


Transient

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Cosmic & Earthly, Infinite & Transient [3]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Betrayal, Character Death, Drug Use, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Mid-Canon, Military Backstory, Non-Linear Narrative, Origins, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Psychological Trauma, Secrets, Slow Burn, Suicide, Threats, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-04-29 16:32:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14476704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: “You look happy,” Arthur says, before turning to the roll of plush grass where the Cobb children squeal on the trampoline. He nods, and then he says, “So do they.”The next time Dom sees Arthur, he’s tied to a gurney in a locked room, two degrees of separation from execution with an unwelcome thumbprint bruise on his jaw.





	1. PART ONE

**Author's Note:**

> This is the third story in this series, and I told people in the last story they didn’t need to read them in order but I’ve changed my mind. READ THE OTHERS FIRST, PEOPLE, it might not make sense otherwise...although if you do, and it does, let me know!
> 
> Now, I know not everyone is a big fan of Dom. It’s understandable, because he’s a bit of a twat. However, I like to think the twat we saw in Inception is a very exaggerated version of real life Dom Cobb, given that, you know, he was being haunted the guilt-storm that was Mal at the time. I realise I also didn’t paint a great picture of him in Infinite, but again, he was going through some serious stuff.  
> What I’m trying to say is, I hope you can put your hatred aside and give Dom a chance to redeem himself here. I have never cared hugely for Dom, but in writing this I’ve realised actually, he’s kind of great, if a bit of a twat. I hope you think so too.
> 
> This story will be covering, at least in part, Mal’s decline into madness and her eventual suicide. It’s going to be rough and I probably won’t pull my punches. (Although why any of you would think by now I’m going to pull my punches, I have no idea.)
> 
> Thank you for sticking with me on this journey, I hope I won’t disappoint you. Please do leave your thoughts and feels in a review, I love to know what you guys are thinking, or if you have any questions that need answering.
> 
> Always love,
> 
> LRCx

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Learning.

.

.

The acid fumes irritate his face.

He covers his cheeks and nose and mouth with a thick musty cloth but the sting buries down into his flesh with his sweat as he digs.

Behind him, two corpses.

 _(We must disappear,_ Eames had said. He’d sounded feverish, sounded dead already.)

Dom feels that phantom stabbing in his chest.

The sun climbs higher into the cloud quilted sky. Time is not his friend today.

The muscles of his shoulders and back burn. He can feel that lump in his throat, the same one that was there at the final glance towards his children the day he left.

He misses them, even now. A piteous longing for their shrieking voices and fast-growing limbs.

The dirt clumps wetly once he hits four feet deep. His skin is burnt, peeling.

Behind him, those corpses.

He can’t look at them yet.

.

.

**(before I reckoned you)**

.

.

It begins with her, of course.

At the end of everything, it will always return to her.

.

.

“Pourquoi me regardes-tu?” the young woman asks.

Perhaps  _demands_ would be a better word.

Her head whips to the side in a flurry of dark curls, stony and cross looking. Her fists are clenched angrily on her open textbook.

They’re in the library, so the question is closer to a hiss than anything else.

In his panic, Dom isn’t sure whether she asked  _what_ he was staring at, or maybe just told him to  _stop._

He considers apologising. Her eyes are very dark, an impatient storm.

Noticing the curl of her upper lip, ready to speak again, he resolves to ask her something about Professor Jolin’s class, which he’s fairly sure he’s seen her in before.

What comes out instead, however, to his dire humiliation is:

“You’re very beautiful.”

The young woman looks at him with steely eyes that flash dangerously.

What the hell is her name?

Something short; an easy trip of the tongue.

Dom can feel himself turning beet red, hot at the collar as he squirms.

“Umm, tu est bella,” he says bashfully.

Why do pretty French girls  _do_ this to him? Send his brain to mush and his heart into jackrabbit stutters.

Why on earth did he elect a Paris placement when he knows his eternal crush on Brigitte Bardot will one day be his true downfall?

The woman sitting down the table from him snaps her book shut irritably, gathers her things into her satchel and stalks away.

Dom watches her leave, sighing, and thinks,  _Fair enough._

Just as he hangs his head in only slightly exaggerated shame, a sly voice teases from behind him.

“C’est  _tu est belle,_ pas  _bella.”_

Dom looks up just in time to see another pretty French girl helping herself to the seat on his other side.

“Tu est belle,” he tells her grumpily, feeling too embarrassed to enjoy her humour.

Mallorie laughs that colourful laugh of hers, the one that bursts out of her throat and always makes the librarian glare.

She’s wearing a neat black blouse and her hair is pulled up high out of her face in a ponytail, making her seem even younger than her twenty-two years.

“Dominick,” she coos. “One day you will learn how to shut up and charm a girl with that pretty face of yours instead.”

Dom returns to his textbook, flicking his pencil in his hand and leaving light grey fleck marks on the page.

He can feel her eyes on him, that predatory watchfulness with which she had looked at him the day they met.

“Oh, don’t be sour,” she says, nudging him with her elbow.

Dom shuffles away, neck hot and still ruffled.

“I’m not,” he grumbles to the table.

Mallorie laughs again, that trilling sound, that loudness about her as bright as her eyes.

“Come out with Julien and I tonight,” she says as she starts unpacking her bag and spreading her coloured pens in a delicate fan between them.

“I’m not going out with you and your boyfriend again, Mal,” Dom says.

Only once had been enough. Dom’s always thought of himself as laid back but seeing that guy’s hand tucked just shy of too tightly around Mal’s waist had left Dom feeling unpleasantly dirty, like he’d accidentally become privy to a secret he hadn’t asked for.

Mallorie hadn’t seemed to notice anything wrong, though. She’d joked and jabbered and jeered all night, flitting between her boyfriend and new friend like a butterfly in the hedgerows.

“He’s bringing his sister,” Mal says with such lustful temptation, Dom has half a mind to suggest  _she_  date her instead.

“I don’t want to date his sister,” he insists truthfully.

“I thought you wanted to date a French girl,” Mal says with teasing indignance, as if offended on behalf of all womankind for his slight.

Dom rolls his eyes, taking her dark green pen to start circling the questionable equations on his structural layouts.

“Not just anyone who says yes,” he reminds her defensively.

 _(Tu est bella,_ shit, he feels like such an idiot.)

Mal makes a ticking sound with her tongue that makes it perfectly clear she has no problem with the idea of  _just anyone,_ and what she thinks of Dom for feeling otherwise. Dom wonders, sometimes, if she actually tries hard to be this French, or if it’s a genuine national inheritance.

“Well in that case,” Mal says flippantly. “Why don’t you ask me?”

“You – y – you have a boyfriend!” Dom splutters.

He’s definitely blushing now. He can feel it spreading up his throat and over his jaw as she scrutinises him with a playful, wolfish look.

“For now,” she says lightly.

Dom tries to roll his eyes. Discomfort sticks them on Mal’s left hand, though, the ring on her thumb with the bright winking tourmaline.

“Does Julien know you talk to other guys like this?”

Mal’s mouth curls like a lemon slice in a glass of crystal.

“Yes,” she says under her breath, full of conspiracy. “It makes him jealous and possessive, so he –”

“Ok, thanks,” Dom interrupts, waving Mal’s pen at her to shut her up. “I don’t need to know.”

Mal gives him a look. A real  _look._

It’s invasive, although her stare has always been a little too troublesome. She only looks at things she finds interesting, even people, and Dom often finds himself torn between being pleased at how often Mallorie Miles looks at him and wanting to hide every time she does.

He never dares tell her to stop, though, because she’s fickle and ferocious and easily triggered, and maybe if he says stop this time, she’ll stop always. He definitely doesn’t want that.

“What?” he asks her, and she shakes her head, plucking the green pen from his hand and returning it to its proper place with the others.

She picks up an orange one to replace it with in Dom’s fingers, and he immediately starts annotating the diagrams with through-lines, which is of course exactly what he’d been planning to do.

How did she know?

“Nothing,” she says coolly, eyeing his notes and copying a few into her own margin. “Has my father talked to you about the new internship yet?”

“No,” Dom says, instantly perking up. “Why?”

He likes Mal’s father. Professor Miles is passionate and intelligent and extremely articulate. He’s been kind to Dom ever since his first semester here, when Dom’s stuttering French was utterly shameful and his drawings too complex to show off their cleverness.

Then again, his French is still shameful, and he still gets a lot of stern looks from most of his tutors about his trickier sketches. One of his Professors has actually threatened to fail him if he designs another inverted Labyrinth.

“Ask him,” Mal says, looking at him through her thick eyelashes, leaning so close to her book she’s almost kissing the page. “You’re perfect for it.”

Dom blushes a lot around Mallorie and he thinks it’s half the reason she sticks around. Just for the amusement, a cat playing footsie with its mouse.

“What about you?” Dom asks.

“What about me?”

“Are you going to do it?”

Mal takes a soft little breath, full of mirth and creasing her face into a smile.

“Ask him,” she says, taking the orange pen away from him and replacing it with a light blue one.

Suspicious, Dom throws her a side-eye look before he starts underlining key phrases in the textbook with his new colour.

.

.

It always returns to this. The little fans of coloured pens and the triple encrypted bursts of laughter and the way she had known, all along, how much he loved her. Even before he knew it himself.

.

.

“It’s something of a secret, Dom,” Professor Miles says delicately, when Dom finally asks.

Intrigue has never suited him, and he doesn’t relish anticipation. He lasts all of seventeen hours before taking Mal’s advice and going to her father.

They’re sitting in his office, which is the first sign that something is amiss. Professor Miles never holds meetings in this tiny box of paper and wood, has even been known to eat his lunch in a lecture hall just to make use of the space.

Now, though, the door is shut and so are the windows. Professor Miles’ shoulders are a little hunched, as if he is afraid even of the walls listening in.

“What exactly did Mallorie tell you?” he asks.

Luckily Dom remembers just in time that bad mouthing Mal’s frustrating knack for gossip probably wouldn’t sit right with her father. Instead he shrugs as nonchalantly as he can.

“Next to nothing,” he replies, which is the truth, refraining from mentioning the sincere and pointed looks she’d used like flag signals of a passing ship in her need to make Dom understand how vitally intriguing her news was.

Miles offers him a rueful smile, one that makes it clear he’s fully aware of his daughter’s inherent nature.

“It’s actually with the military, you see. They’ve been developing a really quite fascinating programme involving, well, involving  _dreams.”_

Dom snorts. Miles’ eyes are for the briefest of moments, no matter the difference in shade and shape, identical to his daughter’s. They flash with the same candlelit delight, an intensity of flames and shadows.

“Seriously, Professor,” Dom starts, interrupted by a chuckle from Miles, who nods.

“I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous. And before you get any ideas, no, this isn’t some elaborate joke between Mallorie and me.”

Actually, that thought hadn’t even occurred to Dom.

It has now though. In fact, Dom’s fairly certain that’s exactly what this is, what this has to be as Miles continues,

“There is now, available to those who are privy to the information, the technology to build lucid dreams. Dreams that can be inhabited, explored,  _designed._ That’s where we come in. They have developed a training programme for young architects who will be specialised in dreamshare design. That’s the official term for it, currently.  _Dreamshare._ The ability to go into the same dream with others and share it as one.”

It sounds like a crock of shit, to be honest.

And what could the military possibly want with that, anyway? It sounds more like it would appeal to surrealists and schizophrenics.

“What military?” he asks tentatively, leaning back in his chair and pulling his rucksack closer onto his lap. “The French?”

Miles smiles, as if this is all the hook he needs.

“Quite a few, actually. A lot of UN countries are involved, naturally,” he explains with enthusiasm.

Dom’s not sure why this is  _natural,_ but far be it from him to question the kindest, keenest Professor he’s enjoyed the pleasure of learning from in all his academic career. If Miles wants to explain, Dom figures he at least owes him the benefit of his extreme doubt.

“The United States are making huge discoveries,” Miles continues, as if hoping to ensnare his young American student with praise for his home country. “They’re starting a few collaborations with the United Kingdom, in fact. Joining forces, as it were.”

Miles seems please by this minor pun, cocking a grin that Dom returns more out of politeness than anything else. His head is spinning.

He recalls the flickering eagerness of Mal’s eyes when she told him to talk to her father. Could it really be something like  _this?_ Something bizarre, something abrupt, something that never happens, not in real life, not to people like Dominick Cobb.

“And they want architects,” Dom says slowly, a frown itching at his brow.

He stares at the walls of his Professor’s office, the stencil shapes of various circuits and the coverlets of various notable dissertations, even a few tokens from students.

On the back wall, half hidden by a model of a Renaissance church foundation, he can see the familiar scribblings of Mal’s handwriting around a mock diagram of NASA’s Bumper 2 prototype.

She's always been more of an engineer than an architect, and he can’t keep the tiny fond smile that twitches the corners of his mouth.

“That’s right,” Miles says. “It’s a summer programme, subject to extension if all goes well.”

“Summer?”

It’s January right now. Dom ticks through the months, trying to tot up how his finances would hold out without returning to Maryland for his usual summer money earning frenzy.

Miles nods.

“Paid, of course,” he says, as if reading Dom’s mind, a trick that seems to be a family trait. “Here in Paris. The scientists working here are some of the global leaders in generating and manipulating the chemicals used to induce the dream state. Your work and research would be directly influencing the dream programmes used in France, Great Britain, Italy, Canada and the United States, as well as perhaps a few others.”

Dom’s still staring at the church model, the tiny figurines of priests laid out in what he now realises is a pentagram. He smirks and wonders if Miles has noticed yet.

He should congratulate Mal on her sense of humour next time he sees her.

“If it’s secret, what will it go down on my resume as?” he asks.

Miles chuckles again, a proud sound, as if Dom’s the first person to ask.

“It will be a paid internship through the university,” he reassures. “For our contractors, so any future employers will assume it is a private apprenticeship with one of our partner firms.”

Mal’s eyes glittering, spider grey and sea blue. Her excitement.

_What about you?_

“I’ll do it,” Dom says. “Count me in.”

Professor Miles beams at him, clapping his hands jovially and slapping his shoulder.

“Wonderful! I’ll add you to the list.”

.

.

So, are you doing it, too?

_Of course I am, silly._

Why wouldn’t you just say that before?

_Well I didn’t want to influence your decision, did I?_

.

.

Only later, five years later, they’ll look back and think,  _Maybe we were wrong._

Mal will cry into the baby blankets and Dom will hold his daughter in both hands and apologise, so deeply and sincerely that it chokes him, because there’s nobody else to say sorry to.

.

.

“You’re pining,” Mal says, a long laze of words that drag through the ice cream air between them and sift into the clouds.

“No I am not,” Dom snaps back.

He’s always half surprised by Mal’s capacity to absorb his anger and convert it into laughter. Most of the women Dom has known in his life would get waspish at being spoken to the way he often speaks to her.

Not Mal. She laughs that bird chatter laugh of hers and swats him as she slides a tub of strawberry ice cream across the picnic table to him.

Maybe she’s different, different from every other woman in the world.

Or maybe Dom just hasn’t met many women all his life.

He looks at her, rosy cheeks and purple lipstick and a stupid floppy yellow hat, and thinks the answer is probably  _both._

“You won’t know until you ask her,” she says, kicking his ankle and taking a large scoop of her own sorbet, which is probably lemon and raspberry sorbet. Most of the time Mal surprises him, but some things are absolute, and one of those is he desserts.

“You ask her,” Dom mutters.

He tries to tell himself that Mal is like the irritating younger sister he never asked for; tries to reconcile all the bunched up, car crash feelings she evokes in him with a kind of familial fondness. It never quite works, though.

(He really doesn’t think he’s supposed to have  _those_ kinds of dreams about a sister.)

Mallorie, of course, doesn’t appear to notice.

He’ll look back on these moments, frustrated to realise it was all just wasted time. What he had thought was cat and mouse was nothing so cruel, nothing so inequal. It had been cat and cat the whole time, only he hadn’t realised.

Now, though, he sees only her sunshine face, and when she says her boyfriend’s name with that leering snicker he’ll clam up, when really, he should have just  _said_ something. Anything.

“I wish it were summer already,” she says with a pointed sigh, kicking her legs up over the picnic bench to sun them as she scribbles in her journal.

Dom gives her furtive, eager look.

Truthfully, so does he.

“Do you know how many of us there are?” he asks quietly between mouthfuls of strawberry.

Mal tilts her head, that ridiculous hat flopping to the side over her hair.

“There are four of us in Paris. But there’s another lab recruiting students in Munich and another in Newcastle. My father has been sending designs to the military in London. Well,” she gives Dom a knowing, eyebrow twitched look. “He  _says_ it’s the military.”

“You don’t think it is?”

They’re just close enough to the Seine to hear the water. The hum of the boats and the crackle of footsteps on the cobbles. It’s only April, but the sun is perilous today.

Mal leans over the table, smelling of raspberries and her sweet perfume.

“I think it’s something more  _classified,_ if you know what I mean.”

Dom’s eyes widen.

“You mean, like Special Services or something?”

Mal nods, looking hungry and proud. Her lipstick’s rubbed off a little onto her spoon. She’s so close, he can see the grains of lilac powder on her eyelids.

“Exactly,” she says.

Dom doesn’t share her excitement.

Mal’s visibly enthused by danger, by confrontation. She enjoys explosive arguments with that dick boyfriend of hers and she enjoys asking their tutors facetious questions just to watch them grow irate.

She enjoys picking fights in bars with provocative statements, only half of which she actually believes.

The thing is, she also likes secrets. She likes knowing things that others don’t. In a card game, nine times out of ten she’ll be the one carrying the extra ace up her sleeve.

Dom, on the other hand, isn’t so sure he likes the idea of helping secret government operations, the kind that get people killed, that turn people into liars and hearts from muscle to metal.

“What’s wrong?” she says with a dramatic sigh, slapping the wood of the table to reclaim his attention.

“Will we ever meet the people we’re designing for?” he asks.

Mal opens her mouth, only to close it again, pursing her lips in genuine thought. Her nose scrunches up and she shrugs her shoulders.

“I don’t know,” she says.

It’s the first time he ever hears her say that, and it’s hard to comprehend.

.

.

The next time he hears her say it, everything will be different.

It will still be hard to hear, will still pierce him needle sharp.

.

.

**(and the light)**

.

.

This is how she remains, when the crushing weight of guilt and devotion is eased to something more real, more tender.

The lights of a billion young stars, their heat and their secrets.

That throaty warbler’s laugh, how it filled her whole body with joy.

The look in her eyes as she lifted the veil of lace with such disdain on their wedding day, how she’d glowed despite the inherited dress she despised so much. How she’d intentionally spilled red wine on it, just so she could get changed before their first dance.

This is how she remains to him, his Mallorie; her fire and her softness, and the way she always looked at him, full of curiosity and purpose.

Her unbridled confidence that they belonged together.

.

.

(This is how she remains.)

.

.

In Paris, a park. Bluebells and fireflies.

 _“Plus jamais!”_ Mal shouts, over and over. A bruise on her head and the shape of her boyfriend’s mouth on her split knuckles. The shrill beat of her, rattling in the night.

Her arms wrestling out of his grip and her ire erupting into the nets of the trees. Wine bloody on her lips and the mud on her skirt.

“Nous avons finis! Nous ne sommes rien! Tu n’es rien!”

Her disappointment a well into which all who touch her might drown, should they not take the greatest of care.

She looks at Dom, tear stricken and daring.

“Pourquoi me regardes-tu?” she snarls at him, eyes buried in a sea of tears.

And Dom, lost, hopeless, grips tight all the baffled adoration he feels for her and says, quick, sly, brave:

“Tu est belle.”

Her mouth wobbles, chin jittering dimpled and her nose wrinkling.

Then she laughs a rare, choking laugh. It dissolves rapidly into sobs that she muffles with his shoulder, and he walks her home, holding one hand while her roommate, the jaw-clenched Alexis Vernot, holds the other.

.

.

When the courage is plucked featherless, and the desire is too great, he’ll grab her by the shoulders and kiss her smile; lick the taste of Brazilian coffee and almonds from her teeth and feel the purr of relief in her throat.

She’ll hold his waist hard enough for her nails to bite his skin through his shirt.

She’ll smear lipstick on his chin and her perfume will linger long after she steps back, beaming, to admonish him for his dreadful shyness.

“I was waiting,” she’ll say, ignorant of the irony, made bold by astonishment and glee.

“So was I,” Dom will reply.

.

.

Before that happens, though. Before the breathless burnt ochre sky and the closed loop desert trail with the summitless mountain, there is Jag Six.

.

.

Jag Six isn’t the first representative of DR3AM that they meet, but when he stalks into their sleep lab on the third day of that fateful summer programme, it’s the first time this feels less like a class assignment and more like a military operation.

He’s monumentally tall, with slick black hair and a fuzz of goatee, and he asks for  _reports_ instead of updates, calls them  _recruits_ instead of interns.

He carries himself with confidence that belies dominance. He’s English, but beyond the London vowels there is very little in the way of similarity between him and the academically astute, borderline diffident attitude of Professor Stephen Miles.

“You’ve read the results from our previous iterations?” he barks as they reach their third slide of neurological scans.

“Yes,” Mal says with stout pride. Her nose is pointed high into the air, as if to scent his accusation. “They were not very adventurous with their dosages of somnacin.”

Jag Six tilts his head, his beady eyes alright with curiosity.

They’re dressed in lab coats, as if this might mask something of their identities.

Dom glances at his other two fellows, hanging slightly back behind their reckless ringleader.

Eduardo, a fifth year with a habit of drawing on his hands and arms, so that by the end of every day he is swirling with the tattoos of his thoughts and whims.

Alexis, Mal’s surly roommate who regards anyone other than Mal with a forceful dislike that feels far more personal than it actually is.

Jag Six takes them in, not quite a motley crew but probably a far cry from the uniformed soldiers he’s used to.

(At least, that Dom assumes he’s used to. He wears an invisible badge of honour code that Dom thought belonged only to frat boys and firefighters, but now realises is just an air of permanent belonging.)

Mal makes a light, expectant sound.

Jag Six seems pleased by her impatience.

“They had been warned of the exact dangers of somnacin overdoses,” he says wryly, hands on his hips, elbows jutting out wide, as if it is imperative that he take up as much room as he possibly can.

“You didn’t warn us,” Alexis says grimly.

Jag Six tilts his head in acknowledgement.

“Partly because many of those problems have since been overcome. Partly because, as Miss Miles rightfully points out: it made your priors less adventurous.”

“Less dangerous, too, I’m sure,” Alexis drawls.

Her nut-brown hair is tied back in a severe bun, and she’s wearing bright red glasses that overwhelm her smooth, tanned face.

Jag Six inclines his head again.

“There are a great many factions to this programme,” he says coolly. “You are the fifth generation of DR3AM. A subsection of Operation Somna, the international training organisation signed onto by eleven United Nations parties. You’ve all signed NDAs for a reason.”

He glowers sternly at them.

“It is vital that what we discover is shared only between the agreed nations involved in this research, lest it fall into dangerous hands.”

“Dangerous how?” Eduardo asks, folding his arms as he leans back against the worktop to Dom’s right.

Jag Six considers them. His eyes shift from one face to another, as if figuring them out entirely by posture alone.

“From those that would use these tools for personal gain,” he says with a very particular measure of disgust.

Dom wants to ask what the hell kind of  _personal gain_ might be had from building sandpits in dreams.

Before he can ask, though, Jag Six has clapped his large hands together loudly, moving closer to Eduardo and Mal to ask about their first drafts of the box room, their first design task.

By the time the moment to ask comes around again, Dom’s embarrassed to realise he’s lost his nerve.

.

.

It begins with her sulky sidelong glances.

The beginning of the school year.

Dom arrives in Paris late at night, set up with single room accommodation and quickly perturbed by his lack of roommate to intrude and irritate his comings and goings.

The next morning, he’s greeted by a kindly Professor who will one day toast his health as his father-in-law.

A girl standing, ankles crossed and a butterfly black skirt. One hand gripping the opposing elbow, a pink cardigan tied around her waist.

“And this is Mallorie,” Professor Miles says.

.

.

 _Tu est belle,_ he will tell her.

Tell her grumpily, tell her heartily. Tell her truthfully.

.

.

There’s a before and there’s an after. There are a lot of them. They are the genetic codes of those fragile timepieces, the DNA fragments of then and now, spliced into the hybrid of all that is to come.

There’s a before and there’s an after to every milestone, blistered feet on rough terrain.

Before  _And this is Mallorie,_ and after. Before  _I was waiting,_ and after.

Before  _You’re waiting for a train,_ and after. Before  _We can go home,_ and after.

There’s a before the first time he meets a kid called Arthur, and there’s an after.

There’s a before the last time he sees him.

There’s an after, too.

.  

.

The last time Dom sees Arthur is a Friday in July.

It’s scorching outside. The kids, delighted by their freshly captive audience, are showing off their new acrobatic tricks to an attentive Arthur.

Well, Phillipa displays her acrobatics. James makes two failed attempts at a handstand, then proceeds to sit on Arthur’s feet, drawing chalk patterns on the patio.

The last time Dom sees Arthur, there is nothing particularly special about it.

Dom lives a straight life now, and Arthur has kept a respectful distance. He never visits too hot off a job, always gives plenty of warning. Never outstays his welcome.

The thing is, Arthur is a relic previousness for Dom. He is the memory of that which Dom has sworn will not be his future.

If he were a sensible man, he would have cut ties with Arthur the moment he hit American soil two years ago.

But Dom, he’s not a sensible man. Is, in fact, something of a sentimental one. He owes Arthur, owes him time and attention and memories of things other than getting chased by business moguls or shot in the kneecap and the shoulder and the head over and over.

Even as a fresh-faced graduate, Arthur had quickly found his way into the seedier corners of dreamshare, and Dom can’t begrudge him it. He’d never have survived the fallout of losing Mal without Arthur’s help.

Help Arthur’s never asked reparation for. Help offered freely and kindly and with limitless patience for Dom’s wilted state.

Well, almost limitless.

Dom will look back on this sunny afternoon in his backyard, the char smoke of the barbecue and Phillipa’s laughter and James covered in purple chalk; Arthur’s soft features at ease in the privacy of this little haven. He will look back, and he will wonder if he missed any signs.

It doesn’t work like that, though.

Even if Arthur did have some inkling of the fate that would befall him in the coming year on that Friday in July, he wasn’t going to drop hints to Dom.

At his most aggrieved, Dom will wonder if it would have gone differently had Mal still been there.

Her fondness for Arthur had always been ferocious, even at its quietest.

The ugliest pieces of Dom resented him for it, once she was gone. How dare Arthur have reserved such tokens of her grace for himself?

Or maybe it had been even worse than that. Maybe it had slunk into Dom’s periphery, a visceral dislike for Arthur, for his having memories of Mallorie that were not Dom’s.

Grief, he knows now, is not only unanchored love. It is a giddying, selfish possessiveness of that which is gone.

So perhaps it would have been different with Mal, perhaps not.

Either way, it doesn't matter because Mal is long gone by the time Arthur disappears for the last time.

And Dom, he has a lot of blame, a whole lot of blame and nowhere to hurl it.

That Friday, clear skies and thick grass, larks and crickets.

A good day, a pleasant one.

 _“You’re burning the ribs!”_ Over and over as Dom bats him away with a meat skewer.

Comfortable teasing and bickering about gas levels, the sticky splodges of sauce on the table and the drip of condensation on bottles of Heineken.

“You look happy,” Arthur says, before turning to the roll of plush grass where the Cobb children squeal on the trampoline. He nods, and then he says, “So do they.”

.

.

The next time Dom sees Arthur, he’s tied to a gurney in a locked room, two degrees of separation from execution with an unwelcome thumbprint bruise on his jaw.

.

.

It happens like this.

.

.

“There was a phone call, Dom,” Allie Kershaw says when he gets home from work.

She’s a good kid, with probably better things to do over spring break than babysit but babysit she does.

As the responsible big sister of Phillipa’s best friend, Dom had had only slight reservations about leaving her in charge of his children’s wellbeing the first time.

It’s been almost two years since then, and despite going all the way to Columbia, despite having friends across the country and a boyfriend in New York, Allie still makes time during her vacations to come over to the Cobb household and help out.

She bears a striking resemblance to her mother; long chiselled features that are not angled to smile, yet smile is all she seems to do most of the time.

When Allie first came over at seventeen to mind the kids for a couple of hours on a Saturday morning, she had been timid, and Dom had feared that his precocious eight-year-old would walk all over her.

Nowadays, she radiates confidence that same way she’s always radiated contentment, the kind that Dom had not trusted in the months following his abruptly ended exile.

Nowadays, she is a treasure he is grateful for.

In fact, Dom has threatened Allie’s wrathful disappointment on more than one occasion in order to bend James’ iron wilfulness when needed. It’s a neat trick to be used sparingly, more effective perhaps even than the possibility of Santa’s displeasure come Christmas.

So, on this particular Friday, when Dom gets home a little later than planned to find three exhausted children sleepily watching The Jungle Book while Allie sits at the kitchen table, thumbing through one of Dom’s old architecture textbooks, he feels only the comfortable sinking sensation of being wrapped in the blanket of domestic routine.

“Daddy!” James cries, scrambling with loose limbs to leap into a hug while Phillipa and Grace, Allie’s little sister, wave distractedly from the couch, their eyes glued to the screen where Baloo is about to break into song.

“What did you do today, James?” Dom asks, putting his son back down, where he immediately returns to the TV, yelling over shoulder,

“We read about Mowgli. That’s him, there!”

Dom means to tell his son for the umpteenth time not to put his hands on the television screen, but stalls at the sight of Allie’s worried eyes, the downward quirk of her mouth.

“Oh yeah? That’s great, buddy,” he says instead, knowing full well James is already too reabsorbed in the cartoon to notice his father’s distraction.

Dom moves to the kitchen area, out of earshot of the children, where Allie is holding the edges of her book very tight.

“There was a phone call earlier,” she says again, her eyes darting across the open plan room to the occupied couch.

“Who from?” Dom asks as coolly as he can manage.

There’s a crease in Allie’s brow that doesn’t belong there. A groove of anxiety that Dom recognises from other, more troubled faces.

(Recognises it from his own reflection in old cracked mirrors.)

“Your chemist,” Allie says softly.

Dom blinks, confused, as Allie leans closer and says under her breath,

“Dom, are you sick? Is there - something wrong? He sounded, well, it sounded really urgent.”

Dread creeps up Dom’s spine like fingers, sharp nails and sweat. Instinctively he glances at the blond backs of his children’s heads again.

Allie looks horrified.

“Oh - I - is it serious? Can I help?”

She doesn’t look teary. Nonetheless, she sounds choked up.

An interim wave of affection for the girl fills Dom’s chest, cutting through his anxiety like a breeze.

He’s very fond of her, and he knows she adores Phillie and James. He’s never really put much thought into her holding  _himself_ in any regard, though.

“I’m fine,” he insists with a tight smile that she probably doesn’t believe at all. “Really, Allie. Totally fine. I promise.”

Allie nods, the crease in her forehead not really softening.

Behind them, the kids squeal with laughter over the music.

Dom swallows down the fear tickling his throat and opens the fridge.

“There’s still plenty of the movie left,” he says briskly. “You and Grace staying for dinner?”

“Yes!” Grace shouts from the couch before Allie can even open her mouth.

The older girl grins gratefully.

“If that’s alright, thanks.”

“Of course it is,” Dom says, pulling some tired looking carrots from the fridge. “So, what did he say? The chemist?”

He tries to sound as casual as possible. It’s tricky though, what with that lump swelling to a golf ball behind his Adam’s apple.

“Umm, just to call. He had an accent, and he said it was important. I wrote the number by the phone.”

Dom nods, raiding his cupboards and keeping his mouth set in a decidedly laid-back slant.

“Thanks, Allie,” he says, and he means it.

There’s nothing of Mallorie in her, and he thinks that’s why he likes her company. She’s what he imagines his nieces would be like, if he were ever to pluck up the courage to call his brother and mend those old hurts.

Distance in family, though, it’s like stretching an elastic band too far. There comes a point when letting it break apart is easier than the snap-smack of letting it shrink back too fast.

“Need some help?” Allie asks, reaching for one of the chopping knives across the counter, the exact same tone as she did two years ago when she was dropping her sister off at school and found him, alone, fussing badly over bookbags and James’ disgruntled tantrum.

“Thanks, pal,” Dom replies, sharing her meagre smile.

He puts aside that frightful urge to send her away, to push her and Grace out of the door and tell them not to come back.

He’s safe here. He’s earned this safeness, and he won’t let it go, not for anything.

Not for anyone.

.

.

 _They need you to come back,_ Allie says, later, with urgency and determination, and it’s the only time she reminds him of Mal.

.

.

The last time Dom sees Arthur, his greatest concern is Phillipa’s new obsession with belly button piercings.

.

.

Nine months later, Allie’s brown eyes, her wobbly voice.

_There was a phone call._

.

.

**(in your hair)**

.

.

When he goes, Jag Six leaves them an assignment.

 _A_   _mission,_ he calls it, which sounds awfully James Bond with his clipped English vowels.

He wants them to stabilise second level dreaming, wants clarity and colour and coherency.

Dom wonders what use they could have for second level dreams besides exercising their thrill seekers.

Over dinner one night, sharing a bottle of wine snuck into their lab campus apartment courtesy of Mallorie’s sheer French bravado, Alexis scoffs at him.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

 _Obviously not,_ Dom wants to snap back.

He doesn’t like Alexis very much. She’s awfully self-righteous, and sometimes she looks at Dom with eyes that find nothing to forgive.

“Maybe they’re trying to find a way to fix PDS,” Eduardo suggests as he spoons large scoops of homemade lasagne onto their plates.

Of all of them, Eduardo has in his own way been the calmest these past two weeks. Even now, he brushes the thought of PDS away like a fly in a stable.

 _Phantom Death Syndrome,_ the kindest term they could dream up for those researchers taken out of commission, owing to the fact they woke up from a dream utterly convinced they are, in fact, dead.

“No, they’ve almost cleaned that up already,” Alexis drawls.

Dom opens his mouth to disagree, or maybe to point out that just because it  _rarely_ happens anymore, doesn’t mean it’s fixed entirely.

Mal beats him to the punch, though, sparked with glee.

“Interrogation,” she says. “They’re digging for secrets in people’s minds.”

That wildness, her unbridled mirth as she flicks bechamel sauce over the salad with her waving fork.

“There’s no way the United Nations would sanction  _that,”_ Dom snorts. “That is literally the most unethical thing I’ve ever heard.”

Alexis lets out a cackle of amusement. The glug of wine in her glass, the reed thin light paling her ruddy skin.

“Your government have more secret agencies than the rest of the UN put together,” she says. “Even without them, do you really think they’re not doing something?”

Dom thinks this is pretty unfair, especially seeing as Mal’s father comes from the country that more or less invented professional espionage.

“It couldn’t possibly work,” Dom says instead, because he can’t face another  _your government is worse than mine_ argument with Alexis. “There are way too many variables. You could never know for sure what you were getting is true, rather than their imagination.”

“I suppose you’re anti-torture, too,” Eduardo mutters, half sly as he digs into his food with the same gentle indifference to their bickering as always.

“Well as a matter of fact,” Dom says jovially, tipping his glass in cheers.

He expects Eduardo to smirk back, clearing the air between them all with a mutual rightness, because of course they are all on the same page here, at least.

Eduardo doesn’t, though. After a stilted pause, he gives Dom a contemptuous look.

“You’re in the wrong business, then, Mister Cobb,” he says with severe judgement.

Across the table, Mal and Alexis exchange a look over their wine glasses.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dom asks.

He tries to keep it light, but the fizzing sense of danger lingers over them, stronger than the smell of tomato and garlic wafting over the table.

Eduardo does smirk, then.

It isn’t a mutual look. Doesn’t offer a conspiratorial feeling of togetherness, certainly not rightness.

(It’s a look that Dom will wear, one day.)

“We can take a man down into his own head. We can teach him not to flinch when he shoots projections, we can teach him how to fight and how to survive, how to practice his training drills.

“If we can do all of that, we can take him down into his own head and hurt him. We can break him from the inside out.”

Dom swallows dryly. The red wine feels fuzzy on his teeth, barbs of discomfort in his mouth.

“Just because we can…” he says weakly.

Alexis, her disdain an element of its own.

“You mean like guns, or engines, or atomic bombs?”

Dom doesn’t have anything to say to that.

He looks at Mal, owl bright and doubtful. There’s a dimple worried into her chin and she’s unusually still.

Dom looks back at his food. Two bites, tasteless, even though he knows Mal snuck in more thyme than the recipe asked for when Eduardo’s back was turned.

It doesn’t wash down the lump in his throat.

“My father wouldn’t involve himself in that.”

Mal’s rabbity voice, that thoroughbred confidence in her kin and in her heart.

 _Wouldn’t involve me,_  is left to interpretation.

Dom nods in agreement, and he truly believes it.

Still, he daren’t look up from his plate. Can’t bear to see Alexis and Eduardo’s disbelief, see his own naivety reflected back at him in their judgement.

.

.

(One day, later, much later, that shame. It will pierce him. He will bleed regret freely, like blood around a bullet’s bite.)

.

.

 _(I wanted to tell you,_ his dear and broken friend will say, even later still.)

.

.

And then, on a scorching day, he will sweat that lament into the ground he digs, and the acid will sting his eyes.

Those corpses behind him, waiting.

.

.

**(turned to bronze)**

.

.


	2. PART TWO

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Teaching.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lovely readers,
> 
> I hope everyone is enjoying an utterly delightful summer. I am working a lot and writing very little, but crawling my way through my fics to update asap.
> 
> In agreement with the note from the previous chapter, you absolutely will not understand most of this without reading the previous two fics, so go back to the start, new faces! I'd love to hear all your thoughts.
> 
> Love always,
> 
> LRCx

.

.

His name is Arthur Brandon.

He’s twenty-two years old, clutching his degree like a stout-hearted child.

He stands in Dom’s office wearing a cheap suit, his hair slicked in an unforgiving parting that is probably supposed to age him, but only makes him seem more like a uniform-stuffed schoolboy.

“Sir, with all due respect, advanced knowledge of neurological biochemistry would go a long way in developing your research.”

There is a strange exhilaration in the boy, though he stands very still, his voice flat as a muddy bank.

Dom doesn’t share Mal’s confident instinct for others. He looks up at young Arthur Brandon and wonders what this graceless boy has to be so angry about. Wonders if he should feel trepidation or triumph to have found him.

“We have chemists already, Mr Brandon.”

And Arthur Brandon, with his thin jaw and his rounded ears and his bristly badger manner.

He smiles an odd, childlike smile.

He says, “You don’t have me.”

.

.

**(sun’s sheer death)**

.

.

The first dream Dominick Cobb ever builds is a library.

The heavy shelves, cherry wood, still sweet in the air. The books old as dust and faded by the sun, which comes from the cracks between the cases, in slivers of gold and bronze.

Dom stands inside his dream, designed meticulously to match every library his father ever dragged him to as a child.

Beside him, a crackle of laughter, like the broken bones of a bird.

He turns to see Alexis, her grumpy snout and her folded arms.

“What?” he asks, clamped by his own defensiveness.

He’d have much preferred having Mal as a partner for his first trip. Hell, maybe even Eduardo would have been fine.

“Nothing,” Alexis sniffs. “You are even less guarded, here.”

Dom blinks, his eyes straining to read the titles of the books surrounding them. They’re fuzzy and creased. He’s been practicing sustaining dreams using Professor Miles’ designs, but it’s different with one of his own.

It’s harder, the details are so exact, he knows precisely where everything should be and yet the more he grips it together in the vice of his thoughts, the hazier the world becomes.

Alexis takes a step forward, her hand reaching out for a red leather-bound book, gold leaf in the spine like dappled light.

Before she can touch it, it flies off the shelf, past them both and crashes into the shelf behind them, rattling the whispering pages.

“I’m guarded,” Dom says quite smugly, though he hopes very much she doesn’t try to do it again.

Instead of her usual haughty derision, however, a light of glee. She is a needlepoint, this girl. She is a blade.

Her eyes on the ground behind him, and Dom turns to see the book that had evaded her hand. Open at the centre, one page covered in the blue leak scribble of fresh ink.

On the other, a picture of a face, pencil soft, those dark curls and her eyes shining even in the grey of the page. It is unmistakable. Mal is perhaps even more beautiful in his mind than in reality.

Blushing, Dom nudges the book closed with his foot.

Alexis’ eyes are on his face, her hands swinging playfully by her sides, as if waiting for him to respond.

This blade of amusement, she  _sees_ him. She’s inside his head, quite literally, and he hates it.

The book cases tremble and Dom’s head splits into shards.

Alexis grabs his arm as he staggers, her smirk giving way to snatches of French and English worries.

The dream crumbles like a landslide, and Dom barely has time to cry out before they wake up.

.

.

In the earliest trials, the som-collapse migraines would linger for days in the dreamers.  By the time Dom takes on a placement in a Parisian lab for DR3AM, they last a few hours at most.

He wakes up from his first self-built dream with stardust in his eyes and a throbbing pain in the base of his skull. Mal lays a wet cloth over his head and closes the door to darken the room as quietly as possible.

He thinks at first she’s left him to his groaning silence. Until a small, cool hand slips into his, their fingers interlocking.

.

.

Jag Eight-Twelve is young, not yet scraping thirty.

Jag Eight-Twelve is Dutch; softly spoken and very patient. She might have done better as a Kindergarten Teacher.

“We carry the weight of many minds in our bare hands,” she says, the gravity of her awe deepening her voice like the catch of a well.

They sit in the workshop together, each with a large bed of blank paper. Fat coloured pens.

Mal’s fanned hers out in coded order and Dom grins at her, though she’s too busy scribbling Jag Eight-Twelve’s every word to see it.

“Building is an opportunity,” their newest teacher continues. “We should be humbled by the trust these soldiers are putting in us.”

The French half of their four-week-old quartet are lapping up the philosophy of it all, which is so damn typical and Dom tries not to resent them for it.

They are silver-eyed and delighted. They are the ducks in dreamshare’s muddy waters and with fervour they nod in tandem as Jag Eight-Twelve smiles at them and asks,

“What do you know of paradox architecture?”

.

.

Arthur Brandon, while an enthusiastic researcher, is reluctant to go under in the PASIV himself. He eyes Dom warily as he sets it up in his roomy office, following the IV threads like snakes until Dom hands him one.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Dom says. “Somnacin has been tried and tested to perfection.”

He feels a familiar stirring of discomfort in his stomach as he says it, a wasp disguised as a butterfly. Maybe it’s the look in Arthur’s face, inquisitive, like he might ask for more detail than that.

Then Arthur’s expression turns into one of grim trust, and he nods solemnly.

“I read the papers you published last year on the developmental processing. Very interesting theory on the elastic mind.”

Dom lets out a self-conscious, pleased laugh.

“My wife wrote a better one,” he admits with no short measure of pride. “It’s in French, though, and she’s a bit touchy about allowing translations –”

“Yes, I read that one, too,” Arthur says, still inspecting the PASIV. “Interesting, although I couldn’t quite follow her principle of belief. It seemed a little – optimistic? Or, at least, she sounds like she has high expectations of dreamers.”

He smiles as he says it, and  _God,_ his dimples make him look even younger.

Technically, Dom is still waiting on the kid’s references.

He’s trusting an instinct he doesn’t possess, though, the flashing green-light-go that Arthur is going to be a useful asset to the lab.

 _One dream can’t hurt,_ he tells himself as he helps the kid with the needle and suggests Arthur bring up Mal’s belief principles with her when they finally meet.

.

.

One dream doesn’t hurt.

In fact, neither does two, nor three, nor more.

At the end of the day, after six ten-minute sessions to introduce the basic key elements of dreams, Dom raises his suggestion from  _when they finally meet_ to  _over dinner tomorrow night._

.

.

Arthur accepts with shocked enthusiasm.

He grins eagerly and he says, “Gosh Mr Cobb, thank you, yes, certainly. Thank you!”

And Dom, he tries not to feel too conceited in his excitement.

.

.

“The kid’s a natural, Mal,” he says that night, while she rocks Phillipa in half turns by the window as Dom changes the blankets in her cot. “He’s like Shane all over again.”

Mal’s hands, strong and gentle around their daughter. The dove coo of her lullaby and the nostalgia in her smile.

.

.

Shane Sak is a British military recruit that comes to Paris ten months into the twelve-week summer programme that changes everything.

Their original quartet lasts for almost six months. Lasts until Alexis gets redistributed to a new, suspiciously unspecified base of operations, while Eduardo leaves the programme to complete his degree without interference from the United Nations.

Shane Sak arrives just in time for Dom to finish building a desert training ground with six configurations and endless trails to explore on-mission.

He’s their own age, still eagerly cloaked in youth. Newly promoted with experience in the field and his head full of ideas.

“I’m not very good at drawing,” he announces before they get started, eyeing the coloured pens warily. Even the pencil tucked in Mal’s ponytail gets a slight glower of disapproval. “And I know fuck all about architecture.”

“What  _do_ you know?” Dom asks, his elation at a new recruit too sharp to hide his grin.

“Well, I went to a couple of the training sessions. Like, you know, meditation and shit.  _Preparing the mind._ Most of the lads thought it was bollocks, but I was pretty good. At least, the Jags said so. I haven’t got a clue, really.”

He wears his self-limitations openly and smirks around his words.

Mal is sitting at the desk, clutching a chamomile tea to soothe the last of her migraine. Dom sits closer, his big speech prepared. In the end, it seems they don’t need to sell it to Shane. He’s already all in.

 _“And,”_ he adds eagerly. “I went to one of Garnett’s lectures, that was fucking cool. You don’t – no, guess not. He’s strictly military, I think. Probably isn’t even his real name – I’m surprised he’s not a Jag already. My name  _is_ Shane, though. I really hope your name is actually Dominick.”

“It is. Well, just Dom is fine,” Dom replies.

Shane’s wonder is infectious. Dom almost feels like he’s discovering dreams for the first time all over again.

He glances at Mal, her tired eyes. She blows cool air over the rim of her cup and sips her tea to hide her grin.

.

.

Shane Sak leaps into the lake of dreams with both feet.

Dom takes him under first, Mal studiously watching over them with her tea and her notebook and her quick mental math.

Shane’s eyes are wide, his heart rate elevated. When their feet hit the ground, the wind picks up in the first traces of a sandstorm, and the dream expands about them. Sheets of grain whistling and stinging past their ankles like a swarm of ants.

“Holy fuck,” he says to the sky, a burnt streak of dark clouds cutting through the cerulean scoop above.

He’s in uniform down here, the insignia of Second Lieutenant stitched into the khaki. He looks momentarily surprised, before seamlessly accepting the change, choosing to focus on their surroundings instead.

It’s a training compound based on the specs given to them by Jag Eight-Twelve. It seems reasonable to assume Shane has served at least one full tour, seeing as he’s a chosen subject. He scans the area with a hawk’s gaze.

“My projections?” he asks, indicating the sparse military folk patrolling and guarding and running.

“Yeah,” Dom says coolly. “They won’t be a problem unless –”

Then Shane tilts his head, a deep look of concentration on his face.

Every single projection stops what they’re doing. The vocal hum of the dream is dampened, until there is only the wind’s hush and the skitter of the desert.

They are all looking at the two intruders.

Dom feels a jolt of panic. They haven’t even taken a step yet and Shane is utterly frozen where he stands. Dom looks at him, at his curious frown.

Abruptly, Shane relaxes. His youthful glee breaks through and when he blinks, all the projections abandon their suspicion as easily as it had been aroused.

Shane lets out a short, breathy laugh.

Dom stares at him, unabashed in his surprise.

“How the hell did you do that?”

Shane raises his eyebrows. For a split second it looks an awful lot like he’s about to say,  _I don’t know._

He refrains, thankfully and after a moment’s consideration he says,

“You already told me about how projections can get hostile when they’re provoked. If they’re part of me, surely on  _some_ level I can control them?”

Dom laughs, then, too. The hissing wind begins to settle.

Shane shrugs, a crooked slant of bashful pride.

“Well, yeah, kind of,” Dom agrees. Can’t deny it, not when he saw what just happened. “But that’s like, lesson six.”

Second Lieutenant Shane Sak shrugs again, stuffing his hands in his pockets like a naughty schoolboy and squints directly into the sunlight.

“Sorry boss,” he says cheekily. “What’s lesson one, then?”

.

.

 _We'll never find another like him,_ he said to Mal that night, after curfew was broken and they were curled speech mark cosy in her bunk.

.

.

Then, four years later, Dom dreams a smooth clean chemical equation designed by young Arthur Brandon and realises he about to be proved wrong.

.

.

Arthur and Mal adore one another.

There is tender familiarity in their exchanges. A fluid stream of English peppered French; laughter that echoes out of every kitchen and lab they find themselves in.

He’s quiet at her funeral. His tears are hidden behind a cool mask and he remains as neatly lined as his suit.

Dom accepts his help without question, doesn’t think to wonder how deep Arthur’s hurt goes in return.

Or who sat with Phillipa and James during the wake.

.

.

**(this quiet, futile)**

.

.

The last time Dom sees Arthur, he’s got a slight tan and his shoulders are loose. He does a butterfly face paint on Phillipa, then redoes it as Spiderman after he makes the mistake of telling her she looks  _pretty._

Then nine months pass, silence and dial tones. It’s not like Arthur to visit often, not like him to send regular updates.

The thing is, it’s not like him to miss Phillipa’s birthday, either.

Dom leaves a voicemail, Christmas Day. He keeps his ear to the ground and the lack of whispers is unsettling.

Then Mal’s birthday comes and goes without so much as a postcard and Dom thinks, maybe, he’s never going to see Arthur again.

.

.

When Yusuf calls the second time, Allie Kershaw is there.

But first, there’s another phone call, full of feathery fear.

.

.

It’s a blistering day, especially for April. The kids have been in the backyard since close to dawn, making the most of the giant trampoline gifted to James for his birthday a few short weeks ago.

The Kershaw family are over for a barbecue, not entirely dissimilar to the one enjoyed in this very backyard the last time Arthur was here.

The Kershaws are nice; they have good taste in wine and spend a lot of money indulging in their luxuries.

Young Grace, dancing circles around a laughing Phillipa, is relentless in her demands for Dom to build a swimming pool and her parents are charmingly embarrassed about it, unaware of the money Dom has stashed in savings accounts accumulating interest as rapidly as Dom is shaking off the guilt for having it at all.

There are the remnants of his extortionate extractor fees, mostly spent during his time in exile. There’s a great chunk of wealth that mysteriously presented itself in the wake of Fischer-Morrow’s final death in the fall following Maurice Fischer’s own demise.

There’s still, inexplicably, barely touched for the dirt it leaves on his fingertips, the hush money he and Mal were paid to keep from getting too upset about the great stacks of research scooped up by federal agents, never to be seen again.

It’s a blistering day, ice lollies in dry mouths and bare feet on merciless burning patio tiles.

Joshua and Delilah Kershaw; their poppy gold daughters, Grace and Alice.

James, young and splendid. Squealing as Allie helps him master his gymnastics on the trampoline.

The heavy char of flames and meat and thick chunks of pepper. Shrivelled dry daffodils and not a cloud in the sky.

“Dom,” Josh says, has to shout over the screeching of James’ backflip landing.

In his hand he waves Dom’s phone, lit up and ringing.

When Dom approaches, he frowns at the familiar number. He hasn’t seen that number in almost two years, but he recognises it all the same, just as he recognises all the memorised numbers from that time, the un-peacetime.

He answers, breezy as the tide, nodding a thanks to Josh and swapping his phone for the space next to the barbecue.

“This is Dom,” he says, just as James manages an almighty air tumble, bouncing so hard he almost does a second in succession.

“Daddy, you’re not looking!” he shouts as Allie tries to settle him.

Then, as he withdraws further still towards the house, a mousy voice answers.

_“Cobb, it’s, it’s Ariadne.”_

He wants to say  _I know,_ wants to tell her he’d recognise her voice anywhere, that port in a storm tremor.

But then she continues, and Dom’s heart sinks into the queasy puddle of his stomach.

 _“I’m looking for Arthur,”_ she says.  _“I think something’s wrong.”_

Dom turns away from the garden, hides his face from Delilah Kershaw’s curious grin and the crease in Allie’s brow as she tries to shush James, who is calling out in demand for Dom’s attention.

He could tell her what a bad idea it is to look for Arthur. He could warn her that if Arthur is even still alive, he is somewhere Ariadne does not want to follow.

He could tell her,

_You’re the second person from the Fischer Job to call me this week, and I don’t know if Yusuf was looking for Arthur, too, but I’m willing to wager this is not a coincidence._

Dom hasn’t tried the number Allie jotted down for him in swirly green pen, and Yusuf hasn’t tried to contact him again.

And Dom, while he is not an entirely bad person, neither is he particularly altruistic. Besides, he knows exactly how difficult it is to dissuade Ariadne Sommerson from a goal, dog bone hungry, that wily coyote that escapes the anvils.

So instead, when Ariadne says,  _I think something’s wrong,_ Dom replies,

“Sorry?” the same way he might if someone had called asking for  _Mallorie,_ which has only happened the once, thank God.

A frustrated, chiding sound, crackling through the ocean that separates them.

_“It’s Ariadne, I’ve been trying to talk to –”_

“Sorry,” Cobb says again, sharp impatience as he avoids the glance Josh throws him through the smoke scattering upwards around the sizzle of steak. “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

He puts the phone down quickly, before guilt can spill his guts wide, onto the patio and down the line.

Shoving the phone into his back pocket he returns to the edge of the grass, where he can better survey James’ vastly improved acrobatics.

Allie, intuitive spark, that godsent girl, has successfully distracted him with a new spin to master.

“Cold caller?” Delilah asks where she sits on a patio chair, clear drink in hand and sunglasses sliding down her long nose.

“Wrong number,” Dom corrects, distracted.

Her eyes track him to the trampoline.

Dom feels his phone in his pocket, burning like a leaking battery into his skin, Ariadne’s mouse chase voice in his head.

She doesn’t call back.

.

.

When it happened, ten years ago. When he fell in love with her sadness as terribly as he had fallen for her grace, Mal said to him:

_We should have known._

.

.

(In forty-nine hours, when he is thousands of miles away, he will think this very same thought again.)

.

.

As it turns out, Shane Sak has an astounding amount of control over his subconscious.

He and Dom build a new training ground. Vietnam jungle and sub-Saharan sand.

They lay traps and create quantum loopholes that according to Shane are  _fucking wormholes in disguise._

Shane misquotes Einstein regularly, chatters endlessly about the elasticity of the subconscious and the projected imagination.

One day, Dom arrives in the lab to find  _A Brief History of Time_ and  _The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy_ sitting on his folders, little gift ribbons sarcastically positioned on their spines and a sticky note stating:  _We’re next!_

Shane’s radiant and enthusiastic and his projections are ruthlessly obedient. He chats like a boy and thinks like a man. He flirts with Mal relentlessly, until Dom is physically twitching, then just before he earns himself a punch in the face, he shows them a picture of his wife and daughter.

“Accident, really,” Shane says, stroking the washed-out print of his little girl. “Lou and I aren’t exactly soulmates, but we both love  _her._ That’s more important.”

Dom looks at Mal, then. At her delicate profile and deft fingers twirling her pen. He thinks, probably, he could never love anything more than her, not even a child, not even one of their own, no matter how deserving they might be.

Jag Six visits twice, asks for updates on  _Second Lieutenant Sak._

He’s still surly and displeased, still rolls his eyes at Mal’s incessant questions and gives her approving nods when he doesn’t want to voice how much he actually likes her.

Shane is different around him. No mouthy posturing, no glitter of malice and marvel.

A Soldier for a General, or something like that.

 _(A Kestrel for a Knave,_ Dom’s mother used to tease.)

The third time Jag Six comes back, he takes Shane with him.

 _I’ve got a job for you,_ he says and within two hours they’re gone.

.

.

Four days later, Dom and Mal’s project supervisor, an architect called Andy Barton, congratulates them on a stellar year of training and offers them positions on an experimental design team working out of Stanford University.

.

.

They don’t see Shane again.

It will be three and a half years before they find out why.

.

.

And then, a decade long onwards, in the baking afternoon of an unruly April Sunday, while the barbecue cools and the empty beer bottles grow in number, Yusuf calls a second time.

.

.

It's brief and violent and it ends with Allie screaming at Dom to calm down, pulling the phone out of his hand and blocking the door so the kids can't get in.

It ends with Dom's heart in his throat and his hands on the floor.

.

.

Josh Kershaw is teaching the kids how to score soccer penalties, while Delilah allows Allie to share her gin martinis under the condition she mixes them properly.

Dom clears up the plates, prepared to dump them in the sink and forget about them until tomorrow morning.

He can’t disentangle himself from the thorny worry of Ariadne’s phone call, can’t shake the urge to try calling Arthur just one more time, just in case.

 _(What do you need?_ Arthur asked when Mal was lying alone in a morgue. Dom had told him then and there exactly what he needed. He hadn’t realised that Arthur didn’t think that question was a two-way street of loyalty.)

He stands in the kitchen, counting the minutes when he hears footsteps behind him.

Allie, tawny and gentle.

“I thought your boyfriend was supposed to be visiting?” he asks with a breezy half smile.

“Don’t start,” she says, teasing, rueful. “Mom’s been at me all week about it.”

Something sticks in her throat at that, and Dom likes the Kershaws a lot but he also knows Delilah Kershaw probably isn’t the easiest mother in the world to please.

He lets it be, taking the dirty plates from her as she approaches.

“Thanks,” he says.

He can see Allie fiddling with something in her hands, maybe a hairpin, but before he can give her a chance to continue, he’s distracted by the sudden buzz of his phone ringing in his pocket.

He drops the crockery in the sink, clatter of porcelain and tin.

Another number, unrecognisable. Allie takes a step back only half looking away in a false display of privacy.

Dom answers, brittle doubt and his heart tripping

“This is Dom,” he says for the second time that day, and for a split second he expects Ariadne to reply.

It isn’t Ariadne.

 _“Mr Cobb,”_ Yusuf says, and his voice is stilted, a constriction of corded anxiety that reaches like vines through their phones and wraps around Dom’s throat.

“Yes,” Dom says through the sour taste that floods his mouth.

His eyes flit to Allie and he inclines his head to dismiss her. She leaves, expression lined with distrust, but she doesn’t go far. Her shadow is still visible splashed over the doorway, spectral guardian of good intent.

“What do you want?” Dom asks when Yusuf doesn’t continue.

_“There’s something quite urgent I need to speak with you about.”_

“Go on then,” Dom says through clenched teeth.

The hand not holding his phone wraps around the edge of the sink, cold chrome, droplets of water on his fingers.

_“Your name’s been coming up in quite a few conversations, Mr Cobb. Conversations that I’m sure you’ll understand wouldn’t normally reach ears here in Mombasa.”_

Dom bows his head, feels the tender pull of the muscles in the back of his neck, sunburnt and stinging.

 _I’m looking for Arthur,_ Ariadne had said, but  _why?_ What could have happened, what could have found her, that she wouldn’t see fit to ask Dom for help with?

Why call the living to help look for a dead man?

He shouldn’t have put the phone down on her so hastily, he should have thought this  _through._

“And who’s been having these conversations, exactly?” Dom asks cautiously, eyes flicking to the door, to Allie Kershaw’s trembling shadow.

Yusuf’s breath, white noise static, radio waves.

_“There’s a man who wants to speak to you, I believe. A Mr Darren Robertson.”_

Dom racks his brains, fidget frantic.

“I don’t know a Darren Robertson,” he says truthfully.

It’s not a relief. If anything, his jackrabbit heart triplets with fear.

Yusuf grunts with impatience.

_“Well he seems to know you. And I don’t –”_

Abruptly, Yusuf is cut off by a clanging crash.

Voices spraying like gunfire, the jabber slash of confusion.

“Yusuf, what’s going on?” Dom says, loud, too loud.

Panic leapfrogging over him scattering his thoughts.

“Yusuf?” he shouts, knee weak tremors.

There’s crashing and shouting, windows breaking thousands of miles away and Dom can hear each shard like a knife at his throat.

And Yusuf, a rapid desperate whisper across the miles and through the radio wave air.

_“You have no idea what’s about to happen.”_

.

.

**(fragile, everything)**

.

.

Arthur Brandon is skittish and surly; bookish and brilliant.

He speaks with cautious disquiet and he holds his breath in the seconds before they go under and he watches Mal with such hawk-like admiration it makes Dom worry. Dom, who is jealous and needy, knows this about himself and tries his best to curb it, but he can’t.

That is, until Mal catches his frown and chides him fiercely.

“He’s infatuated,” Dom insists with misery as she plays with the building models on her ops desk.

Mal rolls her eyes.

“He’s an orphan,” she says.

The next day, Dom watches Arthur watch his wife, and realises that Mal is right, as usual.

Arthur stares at Mal with a kind of hopeful sorrow. As if at any moment she might disappear into thin air.

There’s nothing lustful about it. It’s not even particularly possessive.

It’s something akin to wonderment.

.

.

(It’s hard to resent him, after that.)

.

.

When Arthur stops calling, two years after the Fischer Job, Dom goes to visit Mal’s grave.

Arthur’s been absent for a month longer than he ever has been since the day they met, and even as he resigns himself to quiet, thriving grief, Dom thinks he might be pre-empting tragedy.

Then he sees her gravestone, the deep grooves of her name. The welts of horror are tugged out of him in sobs. He hasn’t cried since he got home to the kids, held their tiny hands in his and kissed their ruddy cheeks.

Dom drops the bouquet of lavender and peonies into the lush grass that covers Mal’s grave, sinks into the ground in a spinal arch of sadness.

.

.

The moment he’s rid himself of the Kershaws, Dom drives to Miles’ house.

He drives precisely at the speed limit, his heart stuttering breakneck, while his children sit quietly in the back.

He thinks he’s probably frightened them, despite Allie’s best efforts to shield them.

Phillipa is staring at him in the rear-view mirror, her big eyes round and accusatory, her mother’s eyes. She thinks he’s leaving them again, he can see it in her troubled little face.

Dom hadn’t known a child could ever look so wise and burdened as his daughter does right now.

It’s criminal. She’s hurting and Dom keeps driving and he thinks about how tiny she was when she was born, her lungs underdeveloped and her eyes half blind.

She’s strong; stronger, he thinks, than he ever was or ever will be.

Eleven years old, she must be falling apart inside, yet she sits so quietly, staring angrily at her father, conjuring new books from her backpack to distract her little brother every time he gets bored.

He doesn’t have the words to apologise to her.

That, he’s sure, is the worst part of all.

.

.

It’s not the longest of drives, but it aches something terrible. They pull up into the driveway. Stephen Miles standing at his front door with watery eyes and a downturned mouth of dismay.

The kids run straight for their grandmother inside and Dom, he can’t blame them.

Barely a day goes by before the black SUV pulls up.

Two men in suits clamber out.

Phillipa’s watching from an upstairs window and Dom wants nothing more than to turn around and shout up to her, princess tower high, to tell her to look away, to be brave, that he’s so fucking  _sorry._

There’s no posturing, no delaying, no waving around of badges.

Just this:

“You need to come with us, Mr Cobb. I’m sure your children will be perfectly safe with your in-laws.”

.

.

There are so many implications in those meagre words and Dom feels them all like he’s back on a window ledge, staring out across the open air at his darling, disastrous love.

He goes, because he must.

Miles cups the back of his head briefly in the first embrace they’ve shared since Mal’s funeral.

.

.

There are implications in that, too.

.

.

In the plane, there are the obligatory handcuffs, loose on his wrists, enough to bite hard into his memories.

The streak of Mal’s tears in a rush of pale death.

Dom replays it all in his head, over and over, that wet rasping end. Yusuf, the damp retch of his doom, echoing over oceans. The crashing of furniture, the shriek of death.

.

.

He sleeps for hours, more out of necessity than desire.

It’s not as if they’ll let him look out of the window anyway, lest he read mountains so well he knows where on earth they’re taking him without being told.

.

.

He thinks about that other journey, the rumble of the plane, first class. The clinking ice water memorial of the dead man in the hold.

 _He was a good man,_ he thinks he said, and the son had agreed. Under different circumstances, Dom would probably have clapped Robert Fischer on the shoulder and said,  _Don’t worry, my old man was an asshole, too._

Under different circumstances, they might have been friends, those two lost boys who never found their Wendy in time.

(Of course, Dom found better than a Wendy Darling.)

.

.

(He lost better, too.)

.

.

The plane touches down badly, a jolt-jerk land and there’s a bag on his head as he stumbles awkwardly down the steps, his arms held up by his grimacing prison guards.

“Right this way,” a prim woman’s voice says, a blend of the Atlantic Ocean that he can’t place.

He feels the moment he steps inside, escapes the bitter cricket heat. It smells of concrete and cotton, here.

The door shuts behind them, the bag comes off and he finds himself staring at the retreating back of a woman’s head, her hair plaited down her back.

A rounded fist nudges the centre of his back, prompting him forwards. He shuffles after that neat, blonde-grey plait, all the way into a room at the end of the white light corridor.

The room has a clinical, office quality. There’s a table flanked by two chairs, one for her and one for him.

He takes a seat and sighs with resentful gratitude when one of the guards step towards him to take off his handcuffs.

She’s older than he expected. There are tight creases around her eyes and dark lip liner spoiling her non-smile.

“Mr Cobb,” she says. “Welcome to Saarland. My name is Grace Rigby. I have some questions for you concerning one of your associates.”

Dom raises his eyebrows heavily. There’s an open laptop on the table showing a screensaver of tree frogs in a dense rainforest. It’s surreal and unexpected and Dom, he almost lets out a chuckle.

Then Grace Rigby reaches over, taps the space bar and a video feed from a CCTV cam replaces the lush green.

The chuckle dies in the back of his throat.

The video is taken from a camera in the upper corner of a dimly lit room. It’s captured the long view of a man sitting in a chair, roped to it like a circus animal, poised and tense.

There’s blood on his shirt and smeared under his nose. His hair is wet and his face is pale. He’s staring up, directly into the camera with a poisonous expression that chills Dom to the bone marrow.

Dom’s breath catches in his chest, a lump choking his airway.

“I believe you know him as Arthur,” Grace Rigby says, sounding smug. Her corrosive pleasure eats through his defences like acid through paper.

There’s a time stamp on the feed, dated four months ago.

Another click, the date jumping into the next month.

Arthur, stripped to the waist and welted with bruises that distort him in purple splashes. He’s no longer in a chair, is curled into a stretching twist of limbs on the floor, overcome with spasms and his mouth is open, corded throat, red cheeks.

Dom doesn’t need audio to know he’s screaming.

“Stop,” he snarls, razor edge fear.

Sweat has broken out down his back and his fingernails are digging into his upper arms.

Click, next month, and Arthur’s kneeling on the ground. He’s crying, he’s  _sobbing,_ he’s scratching dog flea deep at his own raw chest.

Click, click, click.

“Stop!” Dom cries, louder this time, can’t tear his eyes from Arthur, his mouth moving. Confession or prayer, it’s impossible to tell.

She skips ahead once more, and the date reads a month ago.

Arthur, lying on a bed, hooked up to a PASIV. Around him, four others, all lax under somnacin’s hold.

Dom closes his eyes, takes a shuddering breath.

Then Grace Rigby speaks again.

“Your friend has so far dropped two of my best teams into Limbo,” she says.

Dom is disgusted by the tiny flare of pride he feels at that, tries to shove it away even as it embeds itself in his heart.

Grace Rigby obviously notices it, though, because she spits,

“Whatever he’s doing to them down there, three have killed themselves upon waking up so far.”

Dom flinches, the last vestiges of hope sucked out of him. He raises a hand to rub at his tired eyes.

He wants to refute it, wants to point out,

_No, not Arthur, you don’t know Arthur Brandon like I do._

He thinks about that day, the very first one, that young face saying,  _You don’t have me._

If Mal was his sun and his children his stars, then Arthur has been the moon.

Not always there, but always coming back, ever faithful, ever true.

Dom shakes his head and Grace Rigby’s laugh is hard in response.

“What is this about?” he asks and braces himself for the very real possibility his every fear is about to come true. That he is about to discover that this is  _his_ doing.

Whether Fischer or Cobol or some drop kick of a failure from long years past, this will be his doing, he knows it.

“Come with me, Mr Cobb,” she says, standing abruptly and gesturing to the door.

Dom follows, spine prickle slow, and is led back down two corridors, through a swinging door entrance to a room with a viewing platform fronted with dark glass.

Through it, he looks down at four beds ringing circles around a PASIV, closed up and ready. Three of the beds are empty.

In the fourth, hooked up to an IV drip and looking closer to death than Dom can bear, is Arthur. Skeleton skin and utterly still. A thumbprint bruise on his jaw.

“Your friend is in a great deal of trouble, Mr Cobb,” Grace Rigby says, and she means it, every last hateful word. “I would hate for you or your family to suffer for his mistakes.”

It’s a bluff, it  _has_ to be.

Dom isn’t in exile anymore. He is no longer that exposed nerve ending he was three years ago.

All the same, terror rears its ugly head, he can barely move before two sets of hands grab him back, bulky guards with blunt fingernails and locked elbows.

And Grace Rigby’s lazy smile, a triple dare, just begging him to make a wrong move. She tilts her head, scientist curious, soldier brave.

“We have another guest I’m sure you’ll be eager to see,” she says. A flash of teeth, dangerous, gleeful. “A Miss Ariadne Sommerson. She’s waiting for us now, actually. Come, I’ll explain what it is you’re going to do for us.”

Dom feels his organs sink, deflated balloons in a vat of viscous blood.

Ariadne, her hummingbird voice,

_I’m looking for Arthur. I think something’s wrong._

Did she know, then, already?

And Yusuf, his murmur, disquieted, before the phone dropped to the floor.

_You have no idea what’s about to happen._

He follows Grace Rigby through these ringing halls, the burning silent scream of Arthur on that laptop screen imprinted on his retinas.

.

.

Ariadne looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks.

She’s drawn and shivering, her fingers knotting the sleeves of her cardigan. She looks as disappointed to see him as Dom feels to see her.

There’s no time for more than a glance of mutual dismay, though, before Grace Rigby smacks a heavy manila folder onto the table between them, bursting at the seams.

Ariadne’s eyes, honey hazel and brimming with fear. Dom frowns.

Grace Rigby clicks her tongue.

“This is everything we have on Carnus,” she says.

Ariadne’s face is blank.

Of course it is, why the hell wouldn’t it be? She’s young, she’s unburdened, she has no idea of the evils she has inherited in this world.

Dom’s mouth goes dry. A swarm of hornets rise through all the places where hope once resided and he tastes terror, copper red blood.

“Like, Dolos and Carnus?” he scoffs derisively, and it’s ugly, it’s absurd. It’s a vile accusation, one that hurts deep as grief.

Grace Rigby, her little patronising frown, the purse of her displeased mouth.

“Of course,” she retorts.

A laugh splits the air, a lightning strike of destructive force. It’s his own voice, a throaty rage of denial.

Dom laughs because the alternative is to scream louder than he has done since he sat outside that window ledge and watched all the light of his world extinguish itself in a desperate, plummeting end.

Ariadne, Grace, the thick fog of confusion.

Dom feels his knees bruise in a smack as he hits the floor, barely reaches the trash can in the corner before retching into it.

.

.

Everything is different, now.

There is no return from this.

.

.

**(a tapered seed)**

.

.

_To all concerned,_

_Enclosed you will find all the information your employers and partners chose to withhold from you regarding your work on the phenomenon known as Dream-Share._

_They have been lying to you._

_Here is the truth._

_The first human somnacin trial was undertaken by ten test subjects. Eight of them died._

_The oldest casualty was twenty-six years old. The youngest was fifteen._

_You are responsible. So are we._

_In support and condemnation,_

_DOLOS &CARNUS_

.

.

On a day of heavy storms and slow progress, New Year’s bells still ringing in their ears, they received an email, each of them. All of them.

Attached, a virus that shredded their data and a plethora of information that changed them forever.

It came down to this:

Dominick Cobb and all his counterparts across the world, that interconnecting web of secrets, they helped the Jags stabilise rocky subconscious chemicals for deep dreaming.

He thought it was to make it safer for soldiers to dream, when really it was to make it easier for them to torture their prisoners.

.

.

His name isn't Arthur Brandon.

His name is Jeremy Howard.

.

.

**(unsightly)**

.

.


	3. PART THREE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seeking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Darlings,
> 
> PLEASE be warned for (relatively brief) description of traumatic premature birth of a child, in case that's at all triggering. Also mentions of torture, imprisonment, sexual coercion, abuse of power, violent suicide and other quite nasty things. Some fleeting, others less fleeting and more extreme misery.
> 
> Actually, I'm BLANKET WARNING you that this fic is going to be full of really unpleasant things. I think I'm going to cry a lot when I finally finish this bloody series.
> 
> This is pretty short in comparison to most chapters for this series. For some reason, Dom's emotions are literally draining me in a way not even Eames' flailing did, they are so excessive. Who knew? (Everyone knew. The man is an utter wreck and I've decided I bloody love him in all of his stupidity.)
> 
> Thank you so much for the love - I love hearing your thoughts and feels!
> 
> Take care,  
> LRCx

.

.

Phillipa was born on December 24th.

On the 23rd, Mal had been adding the finishing touches to the tinsel monstrosity she kept calling a tree, having scrounged some extra red ribbons from who knows where.

Dom was trying to find a way to sneak an extra surprise present into the pile beneath the lowest branches when Mal let out a shrill gasp of pain. Her big eyes round and wet, her hands clutching her puffed out belly.

“Dom,” she cried as she cupped her groin and her fingers came away stained dark.

He’ll never forget her white-hot agony, the way she pleaded so loudly with her body not to betray her, all the way to the hospital, her impotent fury echoing like a mourner’s keen.

.

.

Phillipa was born at thirty weeks. So tiny and frail, it was as if she were but a ghost of a child.

Mal lost more blood than she could afford to spare and there was a three-hour window of time that Dom lost, where he had no wife and no child and he thought,  _if I lose them, I have lost everything._

Then Mal was unconscious and Phillipa was incubated and Dom stared helplessly through panes of glass at both of them, clawing and crowing and desperate to do something, do anything, just to not feel so utterly redundant.

.

.

**(and then brightly)**

.

.

For his sins, Dom is given some time to  _settle in_ before he’s asked to actually start looking through the files that might well incriminate his closest friend as a war criminal.

He brushes his teeth several times, showers, puts on fresh clothes.

Takes them off, showers again, brushes his teeth and puts the clothes back on.

He stands in the bathroom of the room he’s been afforded, which isn’t quite small enough to be considered a cell despite the conspicuous security cam in the corner of the bedroom.

Dom stares at the grubby edged rectangular mirror nailed into the wall, at the face that blinks out of it. The face Arthur looked at and lied to over and over again for  _years._

It’s not entirely irrational, the surge of blistering hate that runs through him, then. Dom’s fingers curl into his palms and his breath comes out scythed and his mouth is retching wet again to think of it.

It’s excessive certainly, hypocritical quite possibly.

But it isn’t unreasonable.

Arthur didn’t just lie, not the way Dom lied. Arthur created fiction. Arthur  _is_ fiction.

Arthur came to his office on that sunny day in July and he said  _You don’t have me,_ and he must have thought he was so fucking smart, fooling the eager academic. Saying  _You don’t have me_ like he was just another arrogant schoolboy, when really, he was goddamn Carnus.

He wonders to himself, with his hands on the sink edge and his nose close to the silvered glass, if he’d have opened his arms so wide, had he known the truth. It’s not like Dom hadn’t done everything but go to church to light candles for the fuckers, after what they did for dreamsharers.

Dom wants to think he’d have done right, done good. That he wouldn’t have picked up the phone and called General Wallace that very same day and turned in the cheap suited kid claiming to be the thief of all Morpheus’ own nightmares.

The truth of it is, he has no idea what he’d have done if Arthur had told him the truth.

And he never will, because Arthur didn’t tell him.

It’s all puddled together, six inches of rainwater and sludge.

Arthur, with his quick French jibes at a laughing Mal and the way he looked so delighted at being handed a PASIV of his own.

Carnus, tied on the floor and writhing through seizures, his hands bloody and his tears soaking his hair.

Dom doesn’t know if he can wade through these dark waters. There are monsters in this deep, demons without beds to be put in.

Splashing his face under the taps, Dom smooths his hair out of his face and leaves to join Ariadne in their designated meeting room.

.

.

In his pocket, his totem, digging sharp into his thigh.

.

.

“How long have you been here?” he asks as he eases himself into a seat across the table from her.

Ariadne raises her eyebrows in surprise. Her hair has been scraped off her face by a thick red headband and her sweater sleeves are wrinkled.

She looks anxious, rabbit eyes of golden skies.

“Two days,” she replies, shrugging, as if to say  _no big deal,_ as if to say  _not the longest two days of my life,_ which he has no doubt they have been.

He hasn’t seen her since the Fischer Job.

Sure, they’ve kept in the very briefest of contact, but it’s been almost three years since he saw her and it rushes something within him, a sense memory of tragedy. She was his saviour, as only a clever stranger could be.

She is still, he thinks, much a clever stranger now.

Clever enough not to ask him about their cut-short phone call, at least.

Instead, Ariadne fans out some papers from Grace Rigby’s files and pushes a short stack towards Dom instructively.

“I don’t know anything about Dolos and Carnus. I don’t know anything about any of this. It says here his name’s Jeremy Howard. Dreamer 1-8-4-G-2 on Phase Three of the somna trials. Recruited when he was sixteen years old, custody signed over by both parents.”

She speaks with clinical urgency, her eyes on the files and her mouth flat around her words.

Dom looks down at the papers, leafing through, and quickly finds himself staring at a small entry ID photo of an impossibly young Arthur.

No,  _Jeremy._

Jeremy, with the same birthday as Arthur, if not the same year. A high scoring IQ and all the makings of junior delinquency in his eyes.

Jeremy Howard bears a sullen expression reminiscent of Arthur in his more belligerent moods. A few pages of school reports indicate he has the temperament of Arthur’s belligerent moods, too.

His parents are still alive, which surprises Dom for some reason.

There is a death certificate dated January 6th, five days after Dolos and Carnus released the papers condemning Operation DR3AM and all its sister projects.  _Killed in Action,_ supposedly in Kabul.

Known closest associates were a Sergeant Brandon Osmond and a Private Simon O’Keefe.

Of the three, only Jeremy is still alive. Then again, Osmond’s death was recorded barely a week after Lieutenant Jeremy Howard’s, so maybe he isn’t quite as dead as he appears. Maybe’s  _he’s_ Dolos, or maybe he isn’t.

“Ariadne,” Dom says, putting the pages down on the table and waiting until she spares a glance up at him. Her eyelashes tremble with the weight of her stare. “Are you ok?”

A snarl crinkles her nose and for a moment she looks like she’s going to shout at him.

Dom braces for it, keeps his shoulders relaxed and his expression neutral.

It doesn’t come. She licks her lips and lets out a short breath of bullish irritation.

“People I don’t know want me to break into the mind of someone I’ve trusted with my life several times over. Whom I have trusted more maybe than anyone I’ve ever met before. Who apparently isn’t who he says he is, even though I kind of figured that from the beginning.”

If anything, she looks more  _annoyed_ than frightened, and Dom has to admire her resilience. If she’s half as terrified as Dom feels, she’s doing a damn good job of hiding it.

Which, he realises with a pang, is at least partly thanks to Arthur’s training.

“He’s dropped people into  _Limbo,_ Cobb,” she says. Spits the word with force, as if it gets caught caramel-sticky on her tongue. “Whatever it is he’s hiding, he’s fighting with everything he’s got to protect it.”

There’s a jug of ice water on the table and two glasses. Dom pours them some slowly, the ice clinking and splashing as it drops down into the cups. He curls a hand around his own, thoughtful and concerned and never in his life has he been so curious for answers, yet so unwilling to know the truth of them.

“He’s hiding Dolos,” he says simply.

“Unless Dolos is the one that got him caught,” Ariadne points out, playing with the ice in her glass with her index finger.

She’s young, still, he realises with something akin to relief. She hasn’t figured it all out yet.

This Arthur, this  _Jeremy,_ he’s young.

Despite being two years older than Dom thought he was, he’s still very young and that means he was  _incredibly_ young when he stole from his own government and destroyed millions of dollars of research programmes with the click of some emails and a great deal of suspiciously operated dream thefts.

Whoever Dolos is, they’re older than Arthur. They’re older, and quite possibly, they took advantage of that.

Quite possibly, Arthur wouldn’t dare  _dream_ of giving up Dolos, because he considers himself indebted to Dolos. Even if this unknown, unquantifiable variable  _is_ the reason Arthur got caught, even if Arthur  _knows_ that, Dom thinks it’s all too possible Arthur’s loyalty would still tie him to their cause.

Then he remembers the look on Arthur’s face at Mal’s funeral, that same look as when they failed to steal the right secrets for Cobol Engineering, that tightly wound  _What’s she doing here?_

The way Dom got distracted and Arthur got shot in the knee and then with barely enough time to catch their breath, they were on a plane to Paris and Arthur was  _still_ following his lead.

Dom grits his teeth and ignores the tiny frown in Ariadne’s brow, buries himself in the research that’s eating up his guts like carnivorous tapeworms.

.

.

Dom knows Arthur’s loyalty is going to kill him.

The only surprise, really, is that it wasn’t his loyalty to  _Dom_ that did it first.

.

.

Then he picks up the sheet again and he reads those names and the terror, it grips so tight.

 _Sergeant Brandon Osmond._ He stares at the name as if to glean some kind of meaning from it. Some great clue beyond the very obvious indicator that Arthur, he’s every bit as sentimental as he’s always pretended not to be.

There’s exactly one existing photograph of them together in Rigby’s file, part of a collection belonging to one of their operation teammates.

They’re in army casuals, along with two other men in slack uniform. A slightly deflated soccer ball between them on the grass where they sit with cans of beer.

Osmond’s smiling, all gold hair glory and he has a lean tanned face. Arthur’s not smiling, but he’s calm, relaxed. He’s looking at someone off camera with easy gentle eyes, their arm barely in the frame, only their Captain’s stripes in view.

Dom looks at Sergeant Brandon Osmond, who was important, important enough to Arthur for him to take his name for his own.

And then Dom thinks, no, surely not.

But he can’t deny the evidence and it sits heavily in his heart, another bout of dusty lung dismay.

.

.

Dom tucks the file beneath the others before Ariadne sees it, and for the life of him he has no idea why.

.

.

In October, leafy mulch on the sidewalks and skies kissed bronze, Dominick and Mallorie build a labyrinth.

It is relentless, sharp corners and lazy spirals, steeps step and steady inclines. There’s a river cutting it into limbs of stone and an underground cave complex that changes with the tide. They get lost in it, make a campfire beneath the reckless starlight and tease each other’s wildness. The wind howls coyote lonely and they are together.

They wake up, not so much refreshed as revived. Not the slightest of headaches, even after a week of dreams.

Mal is delighted, full of a sturdy confidence that’s been absent lately and Dom, he’s so relieved to see her like this, he takes hold of her shoulders, leans into her body and kisses her mouth. Swallows up that chattering laughter.

She kisses him, too, without hesitation. Behind them, a snickering jibe.

_Maintenant, ils seront plus maurais que jamais._

Dom doesn’t know what he did to make Alexis hate him quite so vehemently, but for the first time he doesn’t care. Mal’s smile tastes of lipstick and he can feel her joy in his own heart, like there is only one of them.

.

.

The last time Dom saw Alexis Vernot was in Dubai, a year into his exile.

She had tears of anger in her eyes when he asked how she was and Arthur had intervened with softly spoken lullaby French, that they exchanged over olives while Dom watched them distrustfully.

“Are you fucking her?” he asks Arthur the next day, in a tone of such viciousness he doesn’t recognise himself, this poison in his mouth and gut.

Arthur looks him in the eye with disappointed weariness and says,

“Why would you ask me that?”

At the time, Dom had stubbornly accepted that as a  _Yes._

.

.

He wonders if Arthur fell in love with someone while Dom wasn’t looking. If he hid it out of shyness or shame, or god forbid, out of respect for Dom’s grief.

He wonders if anyone else is out there, still looking for Arthur, waiting for news that won’t come.

.

.

Ariadne knows about Yusuf. She whispers it, superstition and prayer, when they go under with a PASIV, laying groundwork for their trial-by-extraction.

They’ve tried military bases and metropolitan cities and even the old Stanford lab complex where Arthur first approached Dom for a job.

All Dom can think of, though, is that cheeky voice, tooth-lip murmur of  _Sorry boss, what’s lesson one, then?_

And those files, that they tried to claim were lies. The list of casualties for training Forgers.

 _Second Lieutenant Shane Sak,_ who was left comatose after he lost his mind trying to force himself into the skin of another.

.

.

 _Do you think Eames has something to do with this?_ Ariadne asks with genuine curiosity, to which Dom can barely contain a mirthless snort.

His reply is stilted, awkward, and he regrets making a jibe about him having a crush on Arthur the second he says it, even if it does make Ariadne smirk.

.

.

 _No,_ he says, and it’s the only thing he really trusts to be true.

.

.

“Show us what you’ve got,” he said to Eames, the thorny beach con-man who lazed through Sydney’s streets like he owned them.

Eames agreed to go under in Dom’s head, after a weighted glance at Arthur, whose scowl hadn’t abated once all day.

They set up in the hotel room, and Dom watched Eames slide the needle into his own wrist expertly.

So, a practiced user of  _something,_ at least, although that could just as easily be heroin as somnacin.

Dom doubts it’s heroin, although Arthur makes several comments that Eames takes calmly in his stride.

It’s only later, when they’re drinking beer and dazzling each other and Dom is wondering if it’s at all possible that Eames is flirting with him, that Dom explains just how surprised he is that Eames isn’t military.

“Oh I heard about  _them,”_ the Englishman says dismissively, his shirt collar open and his fingers drumming on his beer bottle. He looks a little sickened, that aristocratic nausea that speaks volumes of his upbringing. “Nasty business, although it sounds to me like they got what was coming for them.”

Arthur’s been quiet since they left the hotel, his stare calculating every move Eames has made with derisive suspicion.

Dom feels the stab of annoyance in his gut, as Eames chuckles dismissively.

“It was pretty rough for them,” he says, trying not to sound too disapproving. He must fail miserably, though, because Eames rolls his eyes and drains his beer in one long pull.

“Nobody joins the army to  _save lives,_ Mr Cobb,” he says. “I’m sure they knew exactly what they were getting themselves into.”

Dom’s not sure why this is the last straw, but Arthur is finally overwhelmed.

He stands abruptly, stalling as he fails to offer a reason, what with his barely touched beer.

Dom tries to signal his worry; however, Arthur’s scowl remains firmly fixated on the table near Eames’ drink.

“I need some air,” he says, and Dom is acutely aware of Eames’ steely gaze following Arthur all the way to the exit.

“Touchy little rabbit, isn’t he?” Eames remarks, sounding amused.

“He’s good at what he does,” Dom replies, a sentiment he will echo through the years.

“Hmm,” Eames replies disbelievingly. “Where did you find him?”

Dom’s grateful to move on from the subject of soldierly character flaws and indulges Eames’ curiosity.

The flirting, he quickly realises, is defensive, masking something pricklier, less easily defined.

.

.

It’s different now, Dom realises in this new, apocalyptic light.

.

.

_I’m sure they knew exactly what they were getting themselves into._

How that must have burned Arthur deeply, viscerally. To have his suffering so summarily dismissed by someone of such flippant, disregarding judgement.

It’s a wonder he didn’t shoot Eames there and then.

.

.

 _What did Dolos and Carnus do?_ Ariadne asks.

The answer, painful, the glitter of tears on Mal’s cheeks as she hushed,  _We should have known._

He tells her the truth.

Then he tells are  _why_ they did it.

He tells her what the military did and what the government did, the atrocities committed in the name of science.

He tells her,  _“They experimented on kids,”_ as he looks Grace Rigby directly in the eye, her flinty pride unflinching.

“Every test subject was a vetted volunteer,” Rigby replies, which doesn’t mean anything.

Not when Jeremy Howard’s parents signed a form relinquishing custody of their only son to the state, for apparently no reason other than the fact one teacher thought he might fit a diagnosis of ASD.

.

.

There’s an IQ test that he aced, sixteen and sullen.

There’s a mental resilience test that he almost failed and Dom stares at it, bewildered, because it doesn’t make any sense.

He’s never met a more resilient mind than Arthur’s.

.

.

(It’s all he can cling to, all he has to convince himself that when they go under, there’ll be an Arthur left to extract from at all.)

.

.

And Dom, he hasn’t operated an extraction in years but that doesn’t mean he’s ever stopped being an extractor, any more than he stopped being an architect even after he could no longer build for himself anymore.

He knows exactly how they’re going to find Arthur in his own head.

It won’t be with tricks, it won’t be with sympathy.

It will be with their own, bare flesh vulnerability.

.

.

He watches Grace Rigby’s interactions with her colleagues, with her inferiors, and of course with her prisoners.

She makes no attempt to warm up to Ariadne, which surprises Dom. He doubts very much that Ariadne would ever fall prey to a sisterhood scam, but surely it would have been worth a try?

Yet she is steadfast in her prickliness, unbothered by Ariadne’s recalcitrant mutters.

Dom watches as slyly as possible, tries to fathom just how much Grace Rigby has invested in this. She doesn’t seem like the mercenary type; it’s not out of the realms of possibility, though.

She allows them to interview one of her surviving team members. A twitchy creature called MacPherson who snarls defensively at their questions and whose only real contribution is that Arthur should be put down like a rabid dog.

It stings to hear that, but not as much as the memory of Phillipa’s face, pressed snub-nosed against that upstairs window, watching her father leave again.

So, while Ariadne tries to find some scrap of evidence they can use amidst the endless documents of brutality and revenge, Dom goes to Grace Rigby’s office.

He knocks on the door and lets himself in without invitation and the guard keeping watch doesn’t stop him. The two people inside stop talking when he enters.

Grace Rigby behind her desk, her pale cheeks and her tight plait.

Her guest, a tall man with oily hair, salt and pepper, wearing a dark blue suit and an expression of genuine surprise.

It’s Jag Six.

He’s aged well, still powerfully poised with the presence of a lordly schoolmaster.

Immediately Dom feels the coils of alarm ringing in circles around him. He remembers, not the training or the lectures or the way Jag Six smiled with teacherly pride whenever Mal got too spirited.

No, what he remembers is the way Shane Sak looked that last time Jag Six took him away for a mission.

He remembers the file buried deep in the documents released on the real work of the Jags. Shane’s name among the list of collateral damage, all in the name of DR3AM.

“Mr Cobb, come in,” Grace Rigby says tartly, gesturing to shut the door.

Dom does so, his eyes never leaving Jag Six’s beard bristle face. He looks worn out, and Dom, he hopes the man is fucking exhausted. For the first time in days, Dom remembers exactly how much he has to be grateful to Arthur and his partner for, to  _Carnus_ and to  _Dolos._

“This is one of our seniors on the operations. Darren Robertson. Darren, this is Dominick Cobb.”

Dom has no idea why they’re pretending he’s never met this man before.

He plays along with unwilling silence, taking a seat next to  _Darren Robertson,_ his heart tickling his oesophagus, his fingers clenched bloodless.

 _(There’s a man who wants to speak to you,_ Yusuf said on the phone and Dom, he’d been confused at the time but if he’d known, he’d have said,  _I’ll bet he does.)_

Grace Rigby clears her throat loudly as the men stare each other down and maybe it should be nervous, but if anything, she sounds impatient.

“Robertson was Team Leader on Operation Oneiroi, Mr Cobb. The subsection that, among other achievements, created our first forgers and figured out illusory extraction theory.”

Dom has to bite hard to avoid scoffing at that.

He raises his eyebrows with cool, hurting calm.

“You would still call that an achievement?” he asks delicately, to which Robertson’s mouth curls first upwards, then downwards.

Guilt, however, does not always stick where it is due.

Robertson’s eyes are cold and clear.

When he doesn’t respond, Dom changes tack.

“Or perhaps it’s simply a case of the ends justifying the means,” he suggests.

This time, Robertson does smile, a diamond cutter’s smirk.

“Of course they do,” he says in a reasonable tone.

“Be that as it may,” Rigby interrupts before Dom can get himself into trouble, “We are running out of time. Mr Cobb, you and Miss Sommerson have had ample opportunity to observe and prepare. When will you be ready to execute your plan?”

It’s not a coincidental choice of words.

Dom barely controls the flinch that ruptures his calm, laser focus on Robertson, who seems to sense Dom’s thoughts. He rubs his chin with his thumb, head cocked and he says, very solemnly,

“Whatever guilt are feeling over your friend’s welfare, Mr Cobb, just remember. I lost thirty-two agents because of  _your Arthur’s_ treachery.”

He has the gall to splice his words with a hearty dose of emotion, a choked-up anger of a grieving father figure.

Dom’s own viper guilt coils angrily at the pitiful display. His lips curl and he asks, with a deep abiding venom that he learned from Mallorie years ago,

“Did you really force them to have sex with you to prove they could forge new bodies accurately?”

Robertson’s skewed sneer is all the answer he needs.

In that moment, any doubt lingering in Dom’s mind about where his loyalties lie are obliterated in a heartbeat of visceral, imploding hatred.

.

.

Eames was wrong.

Even if he was  _right,_ he was also  _wrong._

Maybe nobody joins the army to  _save lives,_ maybe that’s true. Still, there’s no way in hell those kids knew what they were getting into.

.

.

 _You have no idea what’s about to happen,_ Yusuf said, and he was right.

.

.

(He wonders if he should tell Ariadne the same.)

.

.

**(bursting with bloom)**

.

.

“I’ve got a job,” Arthur says, nervous, hand-wringing.

It’s not the first time he’s said that, nor will it be the last, Dom’s sure.

Six months ago, Arthur had taken on a job with Bella Nieta, a notoriously ruthless black market extractor who had been credited among the criminal underclass of dreamshare with the first successful extraction on a high ranking politician.

The politician in question might have been a cousin of hers, but the feat was not lessened for this. It’s one thing to poke around a businessman’s trade secrets, but breaching the laws of democracy is a new level entirely, and Mal had been very impressed.

Arthur’s transference, however irregular, to that other morally questionable side of dreamshare had been met by both Cobbs, not with surprise or disappointment, but with steady resolve.

In fact, Dom suspects Mal is secretly thrilled to have an in with the likes of Bella Nieta, would probably seek out an opportunity to work with her, too, and is only keeping quiet for now to give Dom some time to warm up to the idea.

There is an inevitability to extraction work. They are researchers, it’s true, but they are never better than when they are advancing. It’s all theory until they do it for themselves.

Dom nods for Arthur to continue, is a little perturbed by his visible anxiety.

They’re sitting on either side of a large model of Lyon, their chosen practice run of directional manipulation.

(Mal doesn’t like it when they mess around with Paris, which Dom says is snobbish of her and she just smiles in agreement and says,  _So?)_

“I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone for,” Arthur says. “But it’s important.”

He doesn’t like it when Dom expresses too much concern for his well-being, so Dom just nods again and does his best to look understanding.

“More than a month?” he asks, fiddling with the angles of Église Saint-Pothin to avoid staring at the absurd twisting of Arthur’s eyebrows.

“Maybe,” Arthur replies, along with a quiet huff of breath.

“Be careful,” is all Dom says with a shrug of such fake indifference it’s a little embarrassing.

“I always am,” Arthur replies, and Dom thinks it might be a lie.

.

.

He wonders, now, how many of those were jobs for  _Arthur,_ and how many were jobs for  _Carnus._

.

.

 _We should have known,_ Mal said, then.

 _I should have known,_ he regrets, now.

.

.

“You mean you want to insert us directly into his uninhibited subconscious?” Ariadne splutters, looks about as close to enraged as he’s seen her this whole time.

She’s got a sandwich in her hand that she waves around like a conductor's baton and the set of her jaw is click bite breaking.

He’s betrayed her with this reckless suggestion, he knows. It is everything he warned her against under pain of death and she’s recalibrated so many learnt lessons in the past few days already, he knows she doesn’t think she can take anymore.

She's resilient, she's fierce; all the more so for not realising just how much.

“It’s the only way he’ll let us in,” he tries to explain without sounding like he’s pleading. “If we’re vulnerable, he won’t feel as threatened.”

“We don’t even know is he’s still  _sane,_ Cobb,” she spits. There are crumbs on the table, scattered over her drawings.

She pinches the bridge of her nose and breathes once, twice, shaky little exhales of control.

“Ariadne,” Dom says, “I honestly doubt he is. Which is exactly why trying to force some sort of logical layout would be pointless. If he can’t adapt to our environment, we’re going to need to adapt to his.”

She reminded him of Mal when they first met, in an eager, determined way.

Really, though, she’s nothing like Mal. It had been rose-tint-grief that transformed her in his eyes.

Mallorie, fanciful and arrogant and vindictive and wild, who was everything Dom loved and everything Dom needed.

Ariadne Sommerson is none of these things, and really, that’s  _good._

She looks at Dom with resentful trust and nods her head, lemon bitter brilliance.

“It’s going to be awful down there, isn’t it?” she asks, and Dom knows it’s rhetorical, knows she has no interest in having her suspicions confirmed.

He nods anyway, clears his throat and hums.

“Yeah, I think it is.”

.

.

They go under the next day, under Grace Rigby’s pitbull watch.

Arthur, silent and still, water that runs deep. He might as well be dead already.

Ariadne stares with a kind of ghastly horror but Dom, he can’t bring himself to look.

They lie in cots, the PASIV hooked ready between them. The needle pinches and the chemical burn is all in Dom’s head. Pain, it’s in the mind, and Dom’s mind is a blur of terror.

.

.

Grace Rigby’s hand reaches for the PASIV, reaches to send them under and in that precise, desperate moment, Dom feels a surge like a migraine, full force. Nauseated and swollen.

This is it, the collapse and the corrosion. He might die here, in this head, the tragedy and terror of a thousand years of exile.

Here, his friend, the very best friend he maybe ever had, who is going to kill him, kill him whether he means to or not. His heart, it’s  _broken,_ he is so fucking  _broken_ and he knows, he knows Arthur didn’t keep this secret gladly, didn’t keep it spitefully, this was  _protection,_ this was  _possession._

Arthur doesn’t deserve this and neither does Dom and neither does Ariadne, they don’t  _deserve_ this, they did  _good,_ they did  _right._

Grace Rigby’s hand presses down and darkness swallows him up and he hears Mallorie screaming for her body not to betray her, for Dom to hurry, for Dom to just  _jump,_ that leap of faith he never mustered.

He could have done it, he should have done it. Should have followed her, felt that sweep of air and the crippling break of the pavement below. It should have been easy, it should have ended. He’s lost everything anyway and he might not claw himself back from this.

He has failed and he has failed and he will fail again, here, now.

.

.

 _I was waiting_ Mal said, the first time he kissed her and  _They look happy_ Arthur said, the last time he saw him.

.

.

A sob rips out of him just as the dream envelops, and he is buried deep in the mind of monsters that are not his own.

.

.

**(spider silk and petals)**

.

.


	4. PART FOUR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lovely readers,
> 
> I absolutely haven't forgotten about any of my stories - just watching the hours of the day move in double time at the moment!
> 
> I hope some of you can stick with me.
> 
> Always,  
> LRCx

.

.

**(the dew that clings)**

.

.

It’s raining when he lands.

Lands, feet to the floor, jarred knees and bruised heels, winded.

He lands on a wide porch, sticky alligator air and the rain falling in sheets of grey wet over the edge of the roof.

His shirt clings to his back and his armpits. Through the blur of rain, he can see swampy green and low branch trees stooping with age.

He looks behind him, to the mosquito net door and shuttered windows. It’s an old house, decrepit, and he looks out to the drowning lush.

There’s something moving, out beyond the line of rain.

Dom steps through the curtain of rain, fat hot droplets that snake through his clothes, seeking out the coldest parts of him. He’s drenched, staggering under the weight of the water and feet sinking into the brown sludge, the waxy knotted grass bulging with insects.

The rain smells of iron and clouds, of Paris at night through an open window.

Dom can feel his stomach churning, all he wants is to heave up the anxiety bubbling in his waterlogged lungs. The storm echoes, vibrates.

Through the sheet of grey, a figure, rocking to and fro.

Another few steps and he realises they aren’t rocking; they’re standing in a boat, which is swaying, tipsy in the tide of a huge, lake-like puddle that’s swollen into the greenery.

A man, broad-shouldered, soaked to the bone and dressed in a heavy black coat. He’s standing, balanced on strong legs, bent low to weather the unsteady hull of the little boat, with its splintered stern and javelin oars.

He’s standing over a second man, who is cowering on his knees.

Even through the rain, bleary and stinging, he can hear the man begging and pleading although for what, it isn’t clear.

Then the standing man lifts a hand, lifts a  _knife,_ and buries the blade deep into his captive’s throat.

The rain bleeds, ochre and crimson. Dom can taste it. Chokes on it.

The executioner looks up at him, eyes dark, face impassive. A gentle shade of old youth.

He thinks, maybe, Arthur could have looked like that.

Easy as a thoughtless shove, the man pushes the bloodied corpse out of the boat, and the lake-puddle, green with grassy flakes and tremulous with rain, quickly floods red, ever so red.

Dom watches it, watches it spread and swell. Watches his feet disappear into the dewy slime of the grass, clawing up to his ankles, grasping for his knees.

The boat, knocked and rocked, sways closer. The executioner, his knife ready, his mouth a grin, a wily coyote wound.

Dom feels it in his heart and his lungs, in the sodden balls of his feet.

The executioner, with the abandoned corpse floating in the tide.

Dom chokes on the stench of iron and perfume. The boat, right there, its lips juts at his thighs, the knife raised high.

A hand fisting his shirt, heaving him up, hauling him weightless. His throat is closed, his eyes are closed. His toes curl and he tumbles.

Tumbles in and when he hits the wood he feels it in his bone marrow.

The rain clears. Like the sweep of a hand across a board, the clouds disperse in a harsh, wintry breeze.

Dom, eyes open, wet and dry and the executioner, he is gone, too.

He’s lying in the remains of a little battered boat, chips of wood all around him.

Above him, blue so clean it might be painted. Great sweeping brushstrokes of cerulean sun.

He shivers; it runs through him like feet over his grave.

And a voice, sly as summer in June.

“Vermillion, or ruby?”

He’s stung by it, her cadence. She sounds almost French.

He looks at her, a willow brittle woman. Her skin is dark, her eyes green and brown.

“I -” he tries, but it catches on the back of his tongue, sand and salt.

Her brow creases.

“Which do  _you_ think?” she asks, holding out her hands.

The ends of her fingers are stained red. Smeared in splodges across her nails, spilling onto the skin, each finger a different shade of blood. As if she has plunged them into open wounds.

Dom pulls himself upright on shaky limbs, until he is crouched. The boat remains still and when he looks down, the water has disappeared.

There is only fresh clean grass.

The woman shakes her thumbs at him, demanding.

“Vermillion or ruby?”

Both thumbs are bright, terrifying shades, corpse fresh, like the executioner’s knife.

Without considering it, Dom points at her left pinky. It’s a burnt shade, darker and older.

She scowls at his choice, not so much angry as confused. Her lips, glossy and shimmering purple, part slowly in a heavy breath.

“Garnet?” she asks in a small voice, as if it’s a choice she hadn’t considered.

She looks at Dom, an ageless face.

“Are you sure?” she asks, so full of doubt he almost takes it back.

Slowly, Dom hoists himself onto unsteady feet on the grass. Tentative, careful of the shadows in her eyes, Dom reaches to take her hands.

She allows it, as a spooked horse allows the most gentle of touches. Flinching, floundering, her hands in his, fever scorch.

“I’m sure,” he says, although he doesn’t know why. All he knows is that she calms ever so slightly, when he presses her hands towards his chest, as if to cradle those blood-stained fingers, shield them from greater damage.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she tells him, that lullaby lilt, the south of France. Sleepy towns and yellow fields.

Dom nods. It’s the truth after all, and if that bloody execution hadn’t been Arthur’s subconscious screaming at Dom to turn back, to look away before it’s too late, then he doesn’t know dreams at all.

Maybe he doesn’t know Arthur anymore, maybe he never really knew him at all, but he knows  _this,_ knows the mind. The very soul of subconsciousness.

He knows how militarisation, it’s never about  _attack,_ it’s about  _protect._

(And Arthur,  _Jeremy,_ he has so much to protect.)

“What’s your name?” he asks, as he might ask a small child.

The woman shudders. Her shoulders are bruised as if they have been gripped too hard by hands made to punish.

“Hope,” she replies, which doesn’t sit right, per say. Doesn’t sit wrong, either.

Half-truths, half-minds. Half-memories, he thinks.

Dom wonders if Arthur was the executioner or the executed.

Ariadne is nowhere to be seen, but that doesn’t surprise him in the least. Even when Arthur was someone Dom knew, he’d have expected him to be capable of separating them.

Hope takes hold of his hands and bloody varnish smears over his skin. Sinks and fades like fast bruises.

 _“You_ shouldn’t be here,” she repeats and he hears it this time. The intonation, the reprimand.

 _He_ shouldn’t be here. Does that mean Ariadne  _should?_

He ignores the stinging blow to his gut at that.

“I have to find him,” Dom replies. The accompanying apology sticks in his mouth, doesn’t make it past his teeth.

Hope pulls away. He aches to follow her.

“You don’t,” she replies.

He makes to chase her retreating back, the kissing flutter of her lilac dress around her knees but he barely makes it a few metres before he hears a splashing, gagging sound behind him.

The ground is abruptly sodden and he turns just in time to see a figure emerge, spluttering from the pool of inky grey where moments before, there had been a boat.

By the time he reaches her, everything is dry again, even themselves.

Hope has vanished.

Ariadne is on her hands and knees in the grass, gulping air with throaty coughs, shaking so badly he can hear her teeth in her mouth. He presses a hand to the dip between her jutting shoulder blades, murmurs unsteadily,

“You’re ok, you’re ok. You’re - shit, what the hell happened?”

Her hands are wrapped in thick rags, fat over her palms. Soaked red, and Dom can smell the blood it’s so strong, like that pool of crimson with the bloated corpse.

Ariadne opens her gummy eyes, looking dazzled by the sun.

“Mishap with a window.”

Her voice is raspy and cracked.

Dom peeks under the folds of one bandage, knotted tightly on the back of her hand.

“Shit,” he hisses, grimacing at the gaping slices in her hand. “That’s deep.”

She lets out a grunt of agreement.

“Sore, too. Have you seen him?”

“Arthur? No sign of him.”

He glances around. Without the rain crashing through the scenery, the green stretches for endless miles, high into mountain rises and cutting deep trenches in the earth. The big house is gone, replaced with a tiny cottage in the distance.

“Never really thought his head would be so…”

Dom lets the thought disintegrate without taking root in his mouth.

 _Green,_ he thinks. But also,  _Light._

There’s sunlight here, so much now the storm has dissipated. Sunlight the likes of which Dom’s not sure he’s ever seen before.

“What about the Boatman?” Ariadne asks with a very capital  _B_ sound.

“I saw a guy in a boat,” Dom says. If anything, she seems eager at that, so he doubts very much their encounters were at all similar. “And I doubt I will be getting in a boat again any time soon.”

Thankfully, she doesn’t press for details. Rather, finally takes a moment to absorb their surroundings.

“Where are we?” she asks.

“Somewhere mountainous,” Dom replies, feeling trite. At a look from her, he adds facetiously, “New Zealand, maybe?”

It jars in him. He’s not sure why he said that.

He directs her to the cottage, and they make their way towards it with unspoken caution.

There’s been no real sign of Arthur’s presence yet, so Dom knows it’s just his own hollow fear that’s filling the air with paranoia and the prickle of watchful eyes.

The cottage is the roughly hewn colour of sand.

He can read in the keystone above the front door, full of moss,

_In this place, Ethel wed Bertie_

_1893_

It jolts something loose in his memory. He has been here before.

This is a real place. A real cottage amidst mountains, it’s a  _memory._ Dom wants to flee from it. He wants to turn back.

It had been a safehouse after a job, nothing more. Arthur had said he was borrowing it from a friend.

If it’s here, though, all the way down this rabbit hole?

Who was the friend? Why didn’t Dom ask?

Had Arthur taken him to a safehouse belonging to Dolos? Was Dolos so close all this time?

He pushes through the open front door with a gun in his hand that he doesn’t remember drawing.

Dust and pine, the scent of honeycomb.

A door waiting, a door hiding. Dom gestures to Ariadne and he can’t help the nudging attempt to make her fall in line, can’t suppress the irritation when she doesn’t.

Not like Arthur would have.

It’s so obvious, now. That Arthur was a soldier, that he could be moulded so malleably by commands.

“What are you –” he hisses when Ariadne bustles easily into the room before them, without much clear thought for what it might conceal.

The smell hits him first, orange blossom and jasmine. He can’t place it, but it conjures something terrible, a second-hand tragedy as potent as Mal’s perfume to recall.

Dom stares at the dying fire in the unguarded grate. At the dark wood furniture and the fruit basket of tangerines and bananas.

And a plastic chair, backed against the wall. A figure sits in it, elbows on knees and head in hands; he’d know him anywhere,

Arthur.

Not even  _Arthur,_ but the first iteration. That baby-faced graduate that stood in his office at Stanford, that said  _You don’t have me_ with all the cock-surety of the ill-experienced.

Red shirt and slacks, bare feet, he might have just walked out of the upstairs guest room or from the living room after helping Mal tidy up.

This phantom, this spectral Arthur, he stares up at Ariadne, stares at her with such sheer contempt in his face, it rattles Dom’s bones to see.

“Are you completely incapable of remorse?” he snarls.

Ariadne draws back, knocks into Cobb’s chest and he takes her upper arms, steadying.

“Arthur, I –” she stammers, as if maybe he’s real.

Her belief seems to undermine Dom’s own and he falters.  _Is_ it phantom, a memory, or is it Arthur?

Arthur, lip curling and head shaking.

“I’m pretty sure the world has a way of punishing arrogance like yours.”

“You don’t understand,” Cobb retorts, defensive, doesn’t even mean to say it, isn’t even entirely sure Arthur’s even there.

“Do you even know what guilt feels like?” Arthur laughs, derisive, destructive.

This isn’t Arthur. Dom knows, then, because Arthur knows that he does.

Apparently Dolos, however, didn’t. Perhaps this was Arthur regretting his decision. Perhaps this is Arthur confessing, pleading innocence and guilt, grounds of naivety, grounds of  _insanity._

“It feels like your organs are rotting inside you,” Arthur continues, and his eyes are full of young tears. A child’s tears.

 _(They knew what they were getting into,_ Eames said about those soldiers, but here, right here, the ultimate proof that no, they didn’t, they didn’t have the faintest idea.)

“I’m so sorry,” Ariadne murmurs.

Sounds so sincere, too.

Arthur pushes the heels of his hands into the sun bruised sockets of his eyes and he says, choking on brittle sobs,

“Well I do.”

Dom tightens his grip on Ariadne’s arms when she tries to reach for him. Sees again that suited animal in the boat, the red knife in his hands.

And he remembers Arthur, the way he held a gun like it was an answer to a question; poised to strike.

“And I can’t just ignore it,” Arthur continues. “This isn’t going away.”

He stares with such knowledge through the doorway behind them, through  _them._ Stares with such expectancy, Dom glances back, almost expecting to find the other half of this conversation just waiting.

Meanwhile Ariadne, it seems, has cottoned on to this flickering hologram routine of Arthur’s.

“Arthur, do you know who we are?”

“I want to help!” Arthur shouts back, which pretty much answers that question. “And I want you to help me. We did this. Don’t you see that?”

There is no doubt, now, that Arthur is talking to Dolos. That he’s successfully buried Dolos far out of reach in his subconscious, but he hasn’t been able to get rid of those  _memories._ Just deleted the subject, like scribbling out one face in every photo.

Arthur stands, hovering uncertainly between them and the grate, stares hard at the dying fire.

Abruptly, Dom realises this isn’t a coincidence. This house and this memory. This conversation, it happened here in this safehouse. Arthur’s locked it here, between the mountains.

Then he speaks.

“We told them that experimenting in the dream was a good idea. We let them think they could control it. We knew something like this would happen and all we did was pat them on the back with a thumbs up and a good luck.”

Every piece of Dom is taut, stretched elastic. Even before his mind can accept it, his body knows, knows what Arthur is about to say.

Arthur’s looking at the window, for all the world like he could smash it open with his mind.

“Mallorie is dead, Alex,” Arthur says, and it’s like seeing her jump all over again.

Grief ravages him like the merciless beast it is, and Dom feels his knees buckle.

Blood pounds in his ears as Arthur continues,

"She's dead. And you might not give a crap, but I do. Because she was my friend, so I'm going to the funeral. I'm going to help Cobb avoid getting locked up for the rest of his life."

He’s crying as he says it, and it’s that more than anything that sears through the spectral cloud of Dom’s grief, hauls him back from the overboard of it.

Because the thing is, Dom knows objectively that Arthur loved Mal. That he looked at her with an orphan’s eyes even though he wasn’t an orphan at all, as it turns out. Dom knows Arthur thought the world of Mal.

He didn’t ever really witness Arthur’s grief, though. Too lost in his own bereavement, too blinded by the salt of his own tears.

It settles him, oddly enough, to be confronted with that now. To know, beyond any shade of doubt, that Arthur might have lied about his name and his age, lied about everything, but he didn’t lie about loving Mal. He did care, and he did grieve, and he did adore her.

He thinks about what Mal would have done, in his place, in this moment.

Arthur, that ghostly memory, he departs. Vanishes as easily as he appeared.

Ariadne steps deeper into the room, mirage of memory.

“Who was he talking to?” she asks, and he really hopes that’s a rhetorical question. Then again, even if it’s not, it’s better than being asked futile platitudes, like if he’s  _ok._ “Who’s Alex?”

“I don’t…” Dom mutters, because there’s only one face conjured with any kind of clarity at that name.

 _Are you fucking her?_ he asked Arthur, so sour it hurt his tongue to say it.

“Who else were you working with?” Ariadne asks, like it’s that simple.

 _Everyone_ wouldn’t be a helpful answer, although it’s true. And in any case, only a handful were as involved as wholly as Arthur.

“There weren’t many of us,” he says, and then, the memory of that bronze brown hair, those piercing eyes. “There was a friend of Mal’s from college. Her name was Alexis.”

.

.

**(silver)**

.

.

On a cool night in spring, mere weeks before they were inducted into Project DR3AM, Mal punched her boyfriend in the mouth and his retaliating hand cracked so hard across her face, Dom felt it from across the green where he stood next to Alexis Vernot, staring in horror as the push-shove blows began and ended with vigour and rage.

_Plus jamais! Nous avons finis! Nous ne sommes rien! Tu n’es rien!_

They walked her home, later. One hand each, swinging breeze gentle while Mal sniffled angrily into the night.

At the door to her room, Mal tucked herself inside after squeezing Dom’s fingers lightly in an apprehensive farewell.

Alexis lingered, and her eyes were dark with distaste.

“You are no better for her than him,” she said, closing the door behind herself before Dom could muster anything more than a strangled, sorry sound of disagreement.

.

.

And he never slapped her, not once, never even thought about it.

But he invaded her mind and he wrangled her thoughts like hot metal, and maybe, probably, really, that was so much worse.

.

.

**(star’s kiss)**

.

.

The cottage presses upon them, and Dom leaves Ariadne hovering in the hallway.

“None of this is right,” he says, and she tells him, with that exacting surgical slice of hers,

“Without Carnus, without whoever his partner was. Without them, you might still be working for murderers and torturers.”

Dom doesn’t think about that much.

The years he dedicated to research that helped cut down good men and women in their prime.

He remembers that email, on New Year’s Day. The computers crashing and the printouts in the lab. A phone call from a Jag and the threat of fire and brimstone if they didn’t  _burn everything right away._

Like that wasn’t ironic and a bit sickly funny.

Mal, holding Phillipa, crying into her baby feather head, saying,

“We should have known.”

Dolos, the falsifier. Carnus, the truthspeaker. Very fucking clever of them, not to mention breaking into a two-star general’s head and stealing everything worth half a penny.

Leaving him vegetative and rambling.

There was a file on Germany’s forgers, on all seven of them scraping themselves to pieces with stolen knives.

He remembers the way Eames crowed catty arrogance into his wine glass,  _If I can forge a Kandinsky on canvas, I see no reason why I can’t forge the man, too._

And Dom, he just had to laugh, because otherwise he might have cried.

What he remembers most, perhaps, is the way Arthur looked away, to hide his face when he heard that one.

.

.

Dom leaves Ariadne to her fate in that cottage; gets twenty metres before he regrets his hasty exit.  Turns around, mouth bitten with parasitic apologies.

Only, the cottage has vanished. It is as if he’s stepped unaided into another layer of the dream.

He thinks about Mal’s theories on parallel dreams and wonders, idly, if Arthur’s figured it out.

The cottage is gone, as are the mountains. In their place, the cobbled edges of a long, winding path. Renaissance Europe underfoot, sand spills through crispy grass on either side.

Dom walks, smooth stones underfoot and the dense hollow quiet of the desert.  His arms swing heavily by his sides and he eyes the faraway terracotta horizon to what his instinct tells him is East. Dark jade pink, a Turner splash.

The path is clear and curling snake slither angles.

He can see a tall building. White walls, slit windows. Steam rising like a teapot from the chimney.  No door, just a fluttering curtain. Maroon, scraping dusty at the floor.

Dom ducks around it inside, and the wall of sound that strikes him without warning is momentarily deafening. He winces, stock still, as it settles into a reasonable din.

He looks around the empty bar, voices of ghosts, a forest of sounds. Murmurs and shouts, a humming cacophony, like cicadas in the grasses. Out of sight, only stillness in the wailing.  Tables of bottles and ashtrays, the scent of cigarettes without the smoke.

And in the corner, with a good view of all exits, is Arthur at a two-person table. Two cups in front of him, his hands around one and the other at the empty space before him.

Weaving through the empty chairs, Dom eyes the walls littered with paintings of boats, flickered grey-scale photographs and a mural of mosaics, full of scepticism.

He takes a seat opposite Arthur, with his black tea undrunk. Dom looks down at the drink in front of him, a mint tea, the smell overwhelming but the heat of it welcome.

Arthur’s face has a puppyish cling to it, like maybe he’s still a teenager. He’s certainly not older than twenty-one, wearing a thin white t-shirt that’s a bit stretched at the collar.   He’s got that glass wall glaze to his eyes, like he did in the cottage, staring right through Ariadne, to the creature of his past. To Dolos. To Alex.

“God, you were young,” Dom sighs to Arthur’s ignorant eyes.

Clenches his toes in his shoes when Arthur sneers at him. When he grunts a sulky,

“And you look just peachy.”

Dom smiles despite himself. There’s something comforting about the familiarity of his temper. The way some parts of Arthur are so obviously consistent no matter his alias, nor his age.

“You like it?” Arthur asks, schoolboy eager, only to twist sideways into a searing,  _“Oh, as opposed to_ _Dolos?”_

So, Arthur was a recruit, it seems; picked his own alias, too.

Dom tries to get more clues out of Arthur’s face; his sleep-bruised eyes, his hollow cheeks. The sullen way he throws two sugar cubes into his tea.

“How are you going to do it?” Arthur asks with light, conversational falsity, as if the question isn’t burning holes in his tongue.

Familiar indeed, like that disregarding  _You can’t be serious?_ on the plane.

Then he continues, filling Dom’s curious silence.

“You’re going to leak it, obviously. You’ll need some pretty powerful Trojans to break through the firewalls of the government’s servers.”

His voice is low, like a child with too many secrets. Almost lost in the dim rumble of chatter that bounces like falling scree over the empty tables around them, ringing like chimes.

Arthur jumps on his mistake, tooth grit haste –

“Viral software,” he mutters. “Not actual wooden horses.”

Something happens, then, as Dom leans into the table, face hovering over his pungent mint tea.

The chattering of the invisible crowd reverberates, static feedback on an empty stage.

Arthur says something, then. A word, just the one. It’s lost in the rabble of sound.

Dom blinks, momentarily bemused.

Then he laughs, losing whatever Arthur says next because of  _course._ It must be a name. Maybe  _Alex,_ maybe another alias. Probably another one.

Arthur’s no fool. Dom has no doubt that if he and Ariadne came across the name Alex, it’s because Arthur wanted them to. Or, at least Ariadne.

Pondering this, Dom is distracted from his revelation by a strange, sombre look Arthur throws across the table. His voice dipping like a pen into ink around the question, terrified,

_“Did you know?”_

It’s so sincere, so troubled, so ferociously piercing, Dom feels moved to respond. It only gets worse when Arthur clarifies,

“What they’d do. What they’d make us do.”

Whatever Dolos’ reply was at the time, sitting in this cavernous space Dom now occupies, it cut Arthur deeply. He hides his devastation in his hands, shoulders stiff and trembling as he mumbles incoherently into his palms.

Then, wiping his tears away, humiliated, he snarls, angry laughter,

“I always sort of loved you. Right from the start. But it was never like that for you.”

Dom stands up, abruptly so full to the brim with discomfort, he can’t bear it.  Arthur didn’t want to share this with anyone. He’s buried Dolos so far out of reach they’ve disappeared, leaving behind these lonely one-way confessions.  A brutally young Arthur, asking and telling, so young. Young like Mal when she grinned and said,  _I was waiting._

Younger, even.

Dom moves around the room, through the chatter of the non-crowds, until Arthur’s voice has vanished, until he can breathe again.

The photos, they aren’t blurred, or faded at all. They are sharp with the intricacies of memory.  

They are photos of men in uniform, of Sergeant Brandon Osmond, of Grace Rigby, of the woman with the red fingernails, of Mal.  Dom stares at her face, his heart between his teeth. Her face, sparrow slender and so pale. Pregnant, he thinks, with James.

He turns to look at Arthur, at the thoughtful expression on his red damp face.

From the rest of the decor, Dom thinks they might be in Africa.

He looks at Arthur, sitting there so bold plotting the end of his own livelihood, just in time to hear him say,

_“Ton visage est caché.”_

The French, like Mal’s photo, jolts him hard. He thinks again, of  _Alex._ He thinks of Alexis Vernot, how he introduced them to each other, but maybe not.

Did they do this, this great and terrible thing?

He remembers, again, the way they leaned into each other at the bar, that last time, when Dom hated them almost as much as he hated himself.

He looks at Arthur, young, smiling so sadly at someone he  _always sort of loved._

Was it her? Dom never did find out what division Alexis was moved to after she left Paris, left behind the bones of Project DR3AM.

Perhaps it was to the States, after all.

.

.

Dom leaves out the back door, into the rattling streets of a dry, baking city.

Like the bar, it’s loud and deserted and scorching like mint tea straight out of the leafy pot. Dom walks through the unmerciful empty.

There’s a big hospital, Arthur outside it, another look of ghosts in his face. He smokes three cigarettes and then throws up in the bushes.

He flicks the last butt into the middle of the road, and the sparks flutter deep orange on the ground in a spray of ash. Glitters on the ground like torrid frost and the tarmac ignites right before his eyes.

A stream of thin flames erupts, angry snake slits of fire.

Dom stares at Arthur across the street and Arthur, he seems to stare back.   Dom turns from that stare, he turns and he runs. Runs from the face of a devastated boy and from the scorch of the streets, the dead char terror of regret and flames. Like a fever set alight.

Sweat on his brow like acid.

He trips, bloody knees and when he falls a second time, there’s no ground to catch him.

He just  _falls._

.

.

In the earliest of his days, Dom travelled the world in pages.

All his dad’s old maps, pulled unceremoniously off shelves, strewn across the carpet.

Made him so goddamn, whisky stinking mad.

_Dominick Frances, just what the fuck kind of stupid are you, boy?_

Dom’s not spoken to his father in over a decade. He thinks maybe he can wait another, at least, before he changes that.

.

. 

He hits the water hard, caught with a slap of salty pepper ice by the surface.

Submerged in grit and water as cold as the memory of getting on that plane, wondering how the hell he was ever going to get back.

He flails, all arms and legs, a spider of panic, until his head breaks the surface and he gulps haggard air, burning in his mouth and lungs like the tarmac.  His eyes are clenched shut but he can feel the sun, feel her kisses on his gritty cheeks.

And then, suddenly, a hand takes hold of the collar of his shirt and heaves. The front rucks up to his throat, choking him and when he swings his elbows back, they hit wood.

Jolted funny bones, he gasps and flinches; two strong hands, pulling him up.

Up, over the lip of a little rowing boat. His hands swipe blearily at his stinging eyes, he’s shivering, soaked to his bones, salt marrow. He coughs, wretches, a palm slaps his upper back as the light blinds him momentarily and an ever so familiar, peach precious voice says,

_“You are a terrible swimmer.”_

A laugh, hurting, hawking, bursts out of Dom’s throat.

Blinking away the black dazzle spots, he turns his head to see Arthur, sitting in the boat, oars on his lap and his eyes earnest as the stars, present and here. Looking not through Dom but at him.

Dom opens his mouth, however before he can reply he’s entirely overcome with a most awful and ferocious sense of longing, he does something else instead.

He  _lunges_ at Arthur, who pulls back, not fast enough to avoid the sopping wet octopus cling of Dom’s hug.

“Umm,” Arthur says awkwardly, like Dom’s never hugged him before. Which, actually, he possibly hasn’t done in a very long time.

“Arthur,” he says, while waiting for the words to come. Muffled by the younger man’s collar bones, squeezing him tight.

The sun is  _strong_ here, now. Dom can feel his hair drying already.

“I’m here,” Arthur replies, his hands resting incredibly gently on Dom’s back. “Dom, I never –”

“Don’t,” Dom says and Arthur flinches, so small he might not have noticed if he wasn’t holding onto him so tightly. Guilt bubbles inside him. “No, I mean  _Arthur._ You don’t have to – Jesus. I’m sorry.”

Arthur really does flinch, then. Pulls himself with a jerk out of Dom’s grasp to frown at him, as if confused.

“What are  _you_ sorry for?” he splutters.

Arthur pulls all the way back. He stares at his twisted fingers, the bloody bitten cuticles of his nails.  They sit in the boat, the tilting rock gutting them below. Dom watches Arthur wrestle with his own question, as if he’s already forgotten he needs an answer.

Before he can think better of it, Dom reaches out to take Arthur’s hands.  They’re cold, fragile in his grip.

And his face, full of grief as he looks up at Dom like a scolded child and says, more sincerely than anything he has ever said before,

“I wanted to tell you.”

Dom believes that. He didn’t think he would, didn’t think he could, but it’s true. Of course it’s true.

Arthur Brandon, Jeremy Howard. Biochem graduate or teenage lab rat.

He’s still one of the best friends Dom ever had, still took care of his kids when Dom couldn’t, put up with his shit and forgave him his failings, didn't even condemn his lies, which were so much less  _righteous_ than Arthur’s. He's still the boy who looked at Mal with an orphan’s eyes and at Dom with more trust than he deserved.

“Who was it, Arthur?” Dom asks.

Asks, not for Grace Rigby, not for Darren Robertson and not even for his children. He asks for himself. And maybe a tiny bit for Mal, too.

He asks, “Was it Alexis?”

Arthur’s skull, so close to the skin stretched over it. The way he sucks in his upper lip between his teeth and holds his breath like a secret in his chest next to his heart.

“You should tell Rigby what she needs to hear,” he says. “And then you should go home to your children. And if someone – calls. Whatever they say, you should just hang up. Don’t listen to them.”

The boat chitters over high bedrock, jolting them where they sit.

Dom shakes his head.

“I can’t do that, Arthur,” he says.

Arthur’s eyes clenched tight, creases and shadows and long curved lashes.

“You have to.”

There’s a gun in his hand like a judge’s conviction.

“I can’t leave you here,” Dom says, Dom prays, Dom outright  _lies,_ and Arthur sees it, too, knows the truth.

Knows Dom will do he has to do, same as he always has done. Knows Dom is a father before he is a friend.

Lips curled and hungry, he laughs the laugh of the damned. He’s young and he’s howling and he’s braver than Dom remembers, which is unfair and unsurprising.

They wasted so much time not knowing each other, not properly, and now they’ve run out of chances.

“You absolutely can,” he says. “And you will.”

The shot comes from behind. Dom feels it in the back of his skull like a bruise.

.

.

**(on the sea)**

.

.

He wakes up. 

Arthur, asleep, dreaming, or maybe dead.

Ariadne isn't there, and neither is Grace Rigby. 

Before they pull him out of the room and straight into interrogation, he takes a good long look at the thin pull of Arthur's face. Memorises his features and it feels like staring through the window into the backyard at James and Phillie, when he thought it would be forever.

He thinks to himself, with rare and terrible clarity,  _This is the last time I'll see his face._

.

.

He'll be wrong.

.

.


	5. PART FIVE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ending.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Darlings, 
> 
> Thank you thank you for sticking with me. There's one more story to go. Yes, you guessed it. Cosmic, and it is of course Arthur's PoV. It might take me a while, but I will see it through!
> 
> For now, it would be gorgeous to know what you think.
> 
> Yours,  
> LRCx

.

.

~~ARTHUR, I understand why you lied. And I am proud of you. Proud to know you. You did the right thing. I know Mal thought so too. I’m sorry you couldn’t share that with me. I’m sorry I made you think you couldn’t trust me to~~

.

.

The number is blocked.

Dom’s tongue tastes coppery in his mouth, teeth dry chattering.

Miles leans forward, that crease of concern around his tired, pale eyes.

The phone rings and Dom picks it up, his other hand sweating around his half empty coffee cup. Holds it to his ear like it might bite.

The ceiling light, orange and toxic, and above, James shouting indistinctly.

“Hello?” he says and is assaulted with a wet, rasping sound, a sucking bubbling of air in drowning lungs. “Who is this?” he asks, looking at Miles’ ghostly, bewildered face.

Then faint amidst coughing, churning sounds.

 _“Trace this call,”_ a man’s voice says, muffled.  _“GPS on, be – careful.”_

Dom licks his lips, puts down the mug with a heavy clunk.

“Eames?” he asks, hesitant instinct.

He sounds like he’s dying.

.

.

**(and beyond)**

.

.

The grave takes a long time to dig. Longer than it should do. More time than Dom possesses to spare.

Acid acrid, singeing his nostrils through the cloth covering them.

Dom rubs the mucky sweat from his face and arches his back, the muscles along the column of his spine squeezing painfully. He hisses through his teeth, tastes the death that lingers in the air.

Dom slaps the spade down flat, the dent of the ground where two bodies will rot quickly to nothingness, as if they had not touched this earth at all.

The skin of his hands, blistering calluses and weak thumb sockets. He looks around, shadows on the ground like a murder of crows.

“Ready to go?” he asks, and his voice is hoarse.

.

.

**(birdlike, brilliance)**

.

.

He looks back to the beginning. To that returning boomerang thought of  _her,_ to the days spent listless, nauseous, gipping over bad formulas and dreams like shaky cameras fifty years ago.

He looks back on the way Arthur said, so gritty and sure,  _It can’t be done._

He looks back and he realises he never asked if Arthur had tried.

Eames tried. Tried and failed and admitted it openly, like it was nothing to be ashamed of and Dom thinks, that’s probably it, in the end.

Arthur didn’t say much of anything, so many times, and Dom thinks perhaps that his silence wasn’t obstinance, but shame.

So, when he wakes up from the deep dream, in that hospital cell of empty beds, he says,  _Alex, that’s all I got,_ and Grace Rigby does this weird thing with her mouth like she’s pleased or despairing and Dom knows, then, Ariadne’s said as much, too.

“What will you do with her?” he asks, and Grace Rigby cocks her head, sparrows slight, and says,

“She’s resting upstairs. I’m afraid she got a bit over excited earlier.”

Her face is a mask, detached from the rest of her. She is, Dom thinks, an animal dressed in human skin, an inverted selkie with an agenda of her own, slipped free from her masters.

“Alex,” she says, like it’s a new word in her mouth, a language self-taught. “Man or woman?”

Dom blinks a little stupidly, feels the blush in his cheeks, blood gluey in his veins. Honestly, he hadn’t even considered the possibility it was a man.

He realises, then, just how much he’s  _hoping_ it’s Alexis, how much he wants it to be. Alexis, who used to sneer at his designs and cook moussaka with too much aubergine, who pulled him aside to say  _You’re no better_ and who cried at Mal’s wake but only after everyone else was gone.

He thinks about Arthur in the dream, the empty restaurant and the strong leafy tea.

_I always sort of loved you._

And Dom, he follows the guards out to Ariadne’s room, and he thinks about that. Thinks about how he’s never really  _sort of loved_ anyone, never been unsure about love, even if there was a time when he was unsure about everything else, including the very fabric of his reality.

Love was never a question for Dom, and he feels awfully sad, to think it  _is_ a question for some people. That it was a question for Arthur.

.

.

**(a lighthouse in the snow)**

.

.

It comes back to her; it comes back to them.

Phillipa, tiny. Struggling for breath, clinging to life through tubes, born too soon.

And her brother, James, the opposite. James, late, so very late. Could barely be induced and even then, the birth took almost four days.

Mallorie, weary and trembling. Afraid of the stillness inside her. Those fat blue tears on her red apple cheeks and her pinching mouth, gasping prayers to a forsaken God of mercy.

Dom stays in the hospital and Arthur calls him regularly from a job in West Africa, full of worry.

Mal, drugged with pain and intolerance.  _Hysterical,_ he’d have teased her if he hadn’t been so frightened.

 _Arthur?_ she whispers, dozy and drained.

 _Yeah,_ Dom replies.

 _Liar,_ she says, and at the time Dom laughs, because he thinks she means him.

.

.

Eight years later, he remembers, and he wonders if she’d been talking about Arthur.

.

.

**(icy masts)**

.

.

“It always surprised me, that you never came to me after the break-up of the labs,” Miles says in his dry, unbearably reasonable tone.

He’s sitting in the study armchair, where James likes best to curl up and sleep after a nightmare.

Dom is at his desk, wearing a soft thin jumper and the jeans he wore to paint the landing, splattered irreparably with flecks of pale green. He holds his scalding coffee with one hand, the other tapping spider prints onto the worktop.

The kids are upstairs, submerged in blankets and Hogwarts with the ineffable Allie Kershaw.

It’s been days since he got home, and he’s slept four hours on his best nights.

Ariadne is in London, safe, despite Grace Rigby’s best efforts to throw her to the wolves of dreamshare. Dom wonders if it makes him a bad person that he hasn’t offered her a place to stay with him, now Paris is no longer safe for her.

It’s ever so strange, how nothing has changed, and yet everything is so different.

Miles looks at him, hangdog harrowed, and Dom, he says,

“Mal always defended you. She was always so sure you had no idea what you were getting us into.”

Miles looks sad, grateful. That wistful, aging look that reminds Dom that this man lost his daughter; lost her violently and terribly, yet still did so much to keep his son-in-law from joining her.

“What do you think?” Miles asks.

Dom sighs, resting his coffee cup on his thigh, circle burn through the denim making him wince.

“I think you didn’t know, when we joined. But I also think if you found out, after, you wouldn’t have told us.”

Miles tilts his head, a deep angle; it could be a denial, or it could not.

He rubs his chin with his thumb, reaches for his own coffee, then thinks the better of it and leans back.

“I saw what happened to those wretched souls that broke, inside their own dreams. I saw your Dolos, put a knife to his own throat and threaten to slit it, if they tried to make him dream again.”

Dom sips his coffee; a measured, burning gulp.

.

.

Alexis isn’t Dolos, after all.

Dom had been wrong; so very, very fucking wrong.

.

.

Alex, short for Alexander.

.

.

It unfolds quickly, in the end. Too simple to be fair at all.

.

.

Dom arrives in Boston and immediately checks himself into a motel. Calls his in-laws and assures them he’ll be home soon.

Then he lays down on the clean, if tatty motel sheets, face drawn stiff with exhaustion, and sleeps.

He awakes, frantic, to a hard buzz of his phone in the cabinet, plugged into the wall.

Heavy curtains shut, he hasn’t the faintest idea what time it is or how long he’s slept for. Only that he isn’t ready to wake up yet. So, he answers, sitting upright, a little hunched.

Answers the blocked number and tenses, ready for all manner of threatening vitriol.

“Hello?” he says, wincing at the barbs in his throat.

 _“It’s Eames,”_ a voice that is unmistakably Eames replies.

Then there’s a pause, as if Eames expects some kind of response, as if Eames has  _ever_ in his life called Dom before.

Dom doesn’t even know Eames’ number, never has done.

He realises, then, that Eames must have heard about Arthur. Must be fishing for answers, maybe some kind of leverage, so he curtly says,

“What do you want?”

Eames takes a small breath, and it’s like the gasp of death under a PASIV, before saying, in a cool and candid voice,

_“To ask forgiveness on behalf of someone who can’t.”_

For one long, stretching, muscle ache moment, Dom has no idea what he could mean by that.

Then he remembers, clear as the water in that brook they creaked through, Arthur, saying,

_And if someone – calls. Whatever they say, you should just hang up. Don’t listen to them._

The sound that shreds out of Dom’s throat splits the night into pieces. It’s the sound of dry drowning, of despair; of the desperate refusal of a heart sharded.

Eames.

Fucking  _Eames._

Ariadne had been right all along.

Eames, who sneered at military idols and the jabbery fools who followed them. Who forged like he wasn’t of this world and didn’t have a phone or a permanent address; a ghost, footprints in the desert.

 _I always sort of loved you,_ Arthur had said in the dream, in the memory.

But he also said,  _it was never like that for you._

Dom laughs at the terrible pain it must have caused them, two people who tore the world apart together, carrying secrets inside them not even they could touch.

He remembers the way Eames said,  _Why Mallorie, aren’t you a dream?_

How Mal had rolled her eyes and kissed his cheek anyway.

“Did Mal know?” Dom asks, despite not ever wanting to know.

Eames must not hear his reluctance because he replies,

_“About him, yes. Not me, though.”_

“Did anyone know about you?”

 _“No,”_ Eames responds, quick, soft, hurt. Then, solemn, sanctimonious shithead,  _“If it’s any consolation, Arthur almost told you more than once.”_

It’s not a consolation at all.

If anything, that makes it all worse. Makes him wonder if Arthur didn’t tell him out of choice, or if he was talked out of it every time.

“So in Sydney,” he says, thinking of Eames’ indifference, of Arthur’s hostility.

And Eames, he laughs, he fucking  _laughs,_ and it sounds almost real.

_“I was checking up on him.”_

“I thought he just didn’t like you,” Dom admits, wondering.

Not the way he’d liked Alexis Vernot, easy, exhilarated, obvious.

 _“Oh he didn’t,”_ Eames agrees, still mirthful, if forced.  _“Pissed him right off, having me there.”_

 _And all the other times?_ Dom wants to ask, but doesn’t dare.

He leans back against the headboard of his musty bed, the air too thick, the AC spluttering.

Over the phone, he can hear the tremor in Eames’ breath, almost as if he’s afraid.

.

.

Miles doesn’t look ashamed of his confession. Doesn’t look proud, either.

Dom blinks, trying and failing to imagine a version of Eames that isn’t far too narcissistic to kill himself.

He thinks, possibly, he’s never really known Eames at all. Hadn’t really thought anyone did.

Arthur did, though, and it would seem so did Stephen Miles.

It occurs to Dom that Eames lied to him on the phone that night. Someone  _had_ known about him.

Miles.

So, apparently, had Yusuf.

“Dom,” Miles begins, then seems to doubt himself. His pale brow furrows and his hands spread over the armrests of the chair.

Upstairs, there’s a loud squealing of excitable children. It softens the steel in Dom’s chest, the vacuous sensation that something irreplaceable is missing from inside of him.

When he looks back, Miles’ expression has melted a little, too.

“Telling you would have put you in terrible danger,” Miles says, which is the truth.

Dom scoffs anyway.

“Not telling us made us culpable of terrible crimes.”

Miles closes his eyes, pained or perturbed, perhaps dismissive.

“It wasn’t your job to expose those kinds of secrets. It wasn’t your job to burden yourselves with that responsibility.”

Until the end of his days, Dom will never forget the apology in Arthur’s hallowed eyes, the way he murmured,  _I wanted to tell you._

“But it was  _theirs?”_ he asks coolly.

Miles clasps his hands in his lap, grasping for patience, for resolve.

“Two nameless soldiers, disowned by their families? Nobody to miss them, or question their disappearance?”

There are words for those types.

Casualties. Collateral. Cannon fodder.

Dom feels sick to his stomach.

“Arthur – he was a  _kid,_ Miles. A  _kid.”_

“Dominick,” Miles says, and for the first time it’s a little bristled. “Let’s not debate the desperate acts a parent might commit for their children.”

Dom knows he should feel cowed by that. Knows he should appreciate the depths to which he would stoop for Phillipa and James, the depths he _has_ stooped to. Could he have ignored something like that, though, the way Miles did? He’s not so sure.

But of course, he  _is_ doing that, right now.

Arthur’s still there, subjugated, chained up; subjected to Grace Rigby’s wrath while he is home, safe, protected.

And Arthur, there, alone inside his head. Or perhaps not.

.

.

“Are you with Ariadne?” Dom asks over the phone, sitting up against his ratty motel pillows, hopeful and disturbed.

 _“Almost,”_ Eames replies.

Despite having asked, Dom is surprised by the extent of his relief. He hasn’t had a chance to put out feelers yet, but he knows beyond any doubt Rigby won’t let go easy, won’t let _Ariadne_ go easy.

“Good,” he says. “Look, Rigby said she’d let us go, but I think Ariadne’s in danger. She doesn’t have the same kind of protection as I do over here and –”

Eames interrupts him with a brusque bark that Dom doesn’t recognise, a military sound.

_“Rigby?”_

Dom nods, then coughs, tucking tighter into himself against the headboard.

“Grace Rigby. You know her?”

He wouldn’t be surprised, however Eames says he doesn’t.

Of course, he could be lying. It wouldn’t exactly be the first time.

“She’s Interpol,” he clarifies, just for good measure. Remembers one of her suited shadows, that flash of memory stifled like chloroform over an open mouth. “I recognised one of her men from – before.”

Surprisingly, Eames doesn’t make one of his snide comments, which Dom takes as further proof that Eames is more troubled than he’s letting on.

 _“I might know her,”_ he concedes instead. Then, in a rare display of vulnerable honesty, he continues,  _“I assumed Interpol would take the lead. They hunted me down like a fox, the first time.”_

It’s strange to imagine; difficult, even.

Eames and Arthur, mapping this out. Planning scenarios of their inevitable capture.

Dom thinks, maybe, he understands Eames better now. His utter disinterest in doing anything he didn’t absolutely want to do. It wasn’t apathy at all.

He’d spent years doing things he didn’t want to but more than that, he knew, even as early as Sydney, that he was living on borrowed time.

Eames speaks again, interrupting this revelation.

_“I did what I did for good reasons.”_

It’s prickly and defensive and unnecessary. Dom  _knows_ that. Knew even before he was ready to accept it.

“You both did,” he agrees, then adds, “They took us to a base in Germany.”

Even as he says it, staring blindly into the eerie dark all around him, he realises that he only knows that because they told him. They offered no proof and Dom, he foolishly asked for none.

Eames either doesn’t believe him or doesn’t care, because he stays silent.

So Dom asks, even though he knows Eames won’t reply, wouldn’t for anything in the world yet still he asks, anyway,

“You’re going to get him, aren’t you?”

Eames replies without acknowledgement,

_“I’m taking her to London. Do us a favour and put out any fires you hear about, yeah?”_

It’s as good as a  _yes_ as far as Dom is concerned. Eames wouldn’t ask it of him if it wasn’t because he already knows he won’t be there to.

So Dom replies, “Of course,” because it’s the truth.

And then, when he feels an unspoken farewell pass over the Atlantic between them, and his heart is gripped with the memory of the one incredibly important thing he forgot to say to Arthur, Dom says, a little frantic, entirely sincere,

“And Eames? Thank you. For what you did.”

The call cuts off and it makes Dom smile, cold with an unfamiliar sadness.

He thinks quite possibly that nobody has ever said that to Eames before, at least not for this. And he thinks as well about how heavy that secret must have weighed, those memories and those dreams.

And he thinks that, actually, he looks like an Alexander, and maybe he should have guessed.

.

.

They sit in the office room, drinking coffee in a blameful stalemate.

Dom seething, unsure if he wants to shout at his father-in-law or at himself. Upstairs, children’s laughter, reminding them of what they have not lost.

Between them, the ghost of a woman they loved, one of a kind.

And then, Dom’s phone rings.

.

.

**(where the crows might)**

.

.

On the plane, he writes a letter to Arthur.

The first version is four A4 pages of blue biro scribble.

The third starts blue before he has to switch to red.

The sixth is in pencil, half a page.

The seventh is the longest.

The tenth is the shortest.

He keeps the fourth one, in the end.

The rest are balled up and crammed into his coffee cups, like the thoughts inside his head, scrambled consonants in a lump in the back of his throat.

.

.

Mal never left a note, of course, because she didn’t kill herself.

At least, that’s what everyone was supposed to think.

Clever, tricky darling, his wife. And no note.

Dom sometimes feels cheated. Other times, angry.

Mostly he just feels selfish. Tells himself it’s on behalf of his children, only it isn’t.

Sometimes, just sometimes, on the worst nights, he wonders if he might eat a bullet, open his eyes and there she’ll be, holding his hand, her eyes like violets in her petal pale face.

She’ll smile at him so warmly and say,  _I was waiting,_ like the butterscotch taste of a glossy first kiss.

.

.

On the worse nights still, he knows, even if he doesn’t wake up, it would be ok, because he would be with her.

.

.

**(nest, frosty)**

.

.

The phone rings as Dom sits with his father-in-law.

They look at it, both of them. Cat’s eyes on a dark road.

Dom answers, and then Dom leaves, just one last time.

.

.

It unfolds quickly, in the end.

.

.

The number is blocked.

Dom’s tongue tastes coppery in his mouth, teeth dry chattering.

Miles leans forward, that crease of concern around his tired, pale eyes.

The phone rings and Dom picks it up, his other hand sweating around his half empty coffee cup. Holds it to his ear like it might bite.

The ceiling light, orange and toxic, and above, James shouting indistinctly.

“Hello?” he says and is assaulted with a wet, rasping sound, a sucking bubbling of air in drowning lungs. “Who is this?” he asks, looking at Miles’ ghostly, bewildered face.

Then faint amidst coughing, churning sounds.

 _“Trace this call,”_ a man’s voice says, muffled.  _“GPS on, be - careful.”_

Dom licks his lips, puts down the mug with a heavy clunk.

“Eames?” he asks, hesitant instinct.

He sounds like he’s dying.

 _“Please,”_ he whispers, or Christ maybe he whimpers.  _“I can’t – wrong. Was wrong. Please come. He’s here. I know – but for him, you will for him? Don’t leave him lone. Was wrong.”_

He’s rambling, sounds drunk and dizzy, like a bullet in the brain. Dom grips his phone tight, tight, sweaty. Miles’ eyes like needles.

“Eames, where are you? Is Arthur with you?”

 _“We must disappear,”_ he mumbles instead of answering.  _“Was wrong. Sorry. Sorry. Please tell him sorry. Please tell her. She was right. Ná, ná – ná déan. Please. He was wrong. It was. It always – I did –”_

The call cuts at the crescendo of a retching, grasping sob that might have been Eames, but maybe it wasn’t.

Dom can taste his lungs and the ventricles of his heart, feels the air of night on his face through a window that shouldn’t have opened.

 _Come inside_ he’d begged, and he thinks he must have sounded the way Eames did, then, pleading through a phone, vowels like tears in the ground beneath his feet.

“Dom,” Miles says as Dom presses call back, but it just rings and rings and rings.

Upstairs, Phillipa squeals with excitement, two pairs of feet bouncing on the ceiling and the light swings a little and Dom lets out a cry of frustration as he ends the call.

Picks up the landline instead and for the first time, despite swearing he never would, he calls the central Tokyo office of Haruo Saito.

.

.

In his dreams, a voice he did not recognise, saying sorry like he means it.

.

.

Alexander Dalrymple, apparently, he’ll find out later. Suckered into somnacin slavery at nineteen.

And Jeremy Howard, sixteen years old. Locked in an isolated sleep lab for ten days, let out only when he came too close to ripping his corneas out with his fingernails.

.

.

**(as the wind, blistered)**

.

.

On the plane, Dom thumbs a photo of Mal from university. Her bright sunshine face, and ice cream in her hands.

He loves her, still. It is a present feeling, and also past.

 _I was waiting_ she told him and now he’s waiting. Only, for what?

She isn’t coming back.

.

.

_ARTHUR,_

_Thank you for trusting me. I thought at first you didn’t, that not telling me the truth was a sign of distrust. I understand now, it was another kind of trust._

_You came to me with your new name, your new life, and you trusted me with it. You trusted me to offer you a better life than the one you had before._

_I know sometimes I failed you, but I hope I also succeeded. It’s not a high bar to pass, I know._

_Thank you anyway. Thank you for surviving, for clawing your way to freedom. Thank you for loving Mal, and Phillipa and James._

_There are things I should have said, that I wish I’d said. I wish a lot of things._

_You did a good thing. Jeremy Howard did a good thing._

_I can’t promise they will pay for what they’ve done, but I hope they do. I hope I can help make them._

_Thank you._

.

.

**(by the sun)**

.

.

The plane touches down in Bucharest.

The location of the cell phone, before its signal disappeared, is written on the back of the receipt for the coffee he bought at the airport.

He rents a car, and he drives the perimeter of the city limits, down an abandoned dirt road embedded with old tractor tracks.

The car jolts and grumbles, no music, only the piercing sunshine and Dom’s measured breaths. He drives, sees the warehouse from a distance and knows without checking that’s where his journey is headed.

His chest is horribly tight, like the stale air of the morgue,  _Is this Mrs Mallorie Cobb?_

A battered crumpled body that his mouth remembers better than any other.

_Yes._

He drives to the warehouse and he pulls up outside.

There’s a car there already. Sweat on his neck, hands trembling.

Dom steps outside, staring, but there’s no sound, only the wind in the long grass.

He doesn’t have a gun, which feels stupid now, but there’s nothing to be done.

A magpie sits on a post, staring at him, and Dom in childish habit salutes it. Walks to the half open door of the warehouse and steps inside, out of the reach of the sun.

There’s oil here, and dry death.

Dom looks first at the pile of acid barrels in one corner, mucky smears hiding their warning labels. One on its side, open, stinking.

Then, cast aside on the ground, a spade; dark smudge of blood on one corner.

Dom’s feet shuffle loudly over the gritty ground. He turns, not because he wants to but because he must. He  _must._

There’s a camera on a tripod, surely long dead by now. Dom frowns at it, closer, and follows its trained graze on the two crumpled bodies on the ground.

Eames is on his side. The bullet hole neatly placed above his eyebrow.

His face is a mess of bruising, congealed blood smeared over his mouth and his arms are pinned behind his back.

Dom approaches reluctantly, bites the insides of his cheeks so hard he can feel each bursting blood vessel.

Arthur’s slumped over Eames’ lower half, face down, hands tied tight and bloodless at his lower back. He’s caked in mud and blood, worse even than Eames.

Dom’s eyes are stinging, he steps closer, one hand reaching, reaching down as if into the inferno, that he might be scorched, that he might –

“No!”

A voice rings out, echoes like a magpie’s shriek in the warehouse and startles Dom out of his very skin. He flies back in a stumble of feet, frantic, staring up and around and about him in a flurry.

Stares and stares across the warehouse, blinking blinding tears that burn his face.

He stares, and Arthur stares back.

Stares from where he sits half hidden by acid barrels, like a child told to wait and left too long.

In his hands, a gun, gripped with all fingers and thumbs like he’s afraid of it.

Dom looks down at the body sprawled over Eames, at Arthur, who is not Arthur.

 _Please,_ Eames had said on the phone.  _Don’t leave him lone._

Like he knew, knew he might be dead already but knew, maybe, one of them could survive.

Dom reaches down again, that awful wailing child’s voice,  _No!_ until he can take hold of not-Arthur and roll him away.

He doesn’t recognise him, face bloodied to all hell and a bullet hole to match Eames’. He thinks, under the thick dark matt of bloody mulch, his hair might be blond.

.

.

And Arthur, staring at him. Staring at him with eyes lost in a glaze as Dom crouches close, the way he did to get the fox-cubs out from under the old porch.

Tear tracks in his grimy face, pale streaks and bruised eyelids and a mouth that opens and closes until he says, breath in his consonants,

“I think Alex is dead.”

.

.

“We are going home,” Mal promised and she meant it so fiercely that when Dom shouted her name he could taste the brown sugar kisses of her truthfulness.

.

.

“Yeah,” he says, and he nearly smiles, mouth of curls, words curdling in his mouth, junkyard jumble. “Alex is dead.”

And then, to Arthur’s closed and bleeding eyes.

“But you’re alive.”

.

.

**(before dark)**

.

.

Dom digs the grave and it takes hours and the acid stings his face.

“Ready to go?” he asks.

.

.

And Arthur.

He doesn’t say a word.

.

.


End file.
